When I lived in British Columbia, Canada, I used to go running in the forests behind our house. My housemate (appalled at the idea) insisted that I run with his dog to keep the grizzly bears away. At the end of one run I was chatting with a neighbour, a…

How Much Should I Understand? A friend, who’s recently become a product manager, asked me that recently. She’d inherited a technical product where the engineers already had a view of the direction and deliverables required. Even though it had been broken into phases, each phase was large in scope and involved a number of unconscious…

Fourteen billion years ago the universe was immensely hot, dense plasma. Then, as the universe expanded after the Big Bang, the gases within it cooled. …

Prioritisation on the Front Line Job stories, backlog items, workshop ideas, roadmap features… it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the scale of potential directions you can take a product in. And it’s natural to want order in this chaos. Prioritisation is a core part of Product Management, and it’s the topic I most commonly get…

A few months ago we ran a controversial experiment. Skyscanner is predominantly known for flights search. However, it also has a very good hotels product. To increase awareness of this, returning users were shown the hotels homepage instead of the flights one on their next visit. This triggered an interesting…

Benedict Evans made this observation in his latest technology newsletter: “More than half of US shoppers start online with Amazon rather than Google, apparently. Amazon IS Google for products, but neither Amazon nor Google does discovery.” [Reference article by Bloomberg] This has an interesting parallel in the travel metasearch world…

Why you should focus on Riskiest Assumption Tests and forget about MVPs. — There is a flaw at the heart of the term Minimum Viable Product: it’s not a product. It’s a way of testing whether you’ve found a problem worth solving. A way to reduce risk and quickly test your biggest assumption. Instead of building an MVP identify your Riskiest Assumption and…

There’s no doubt metrics and KPIs are an essential part of building a successful internet economy business. When chosen wisely they can help guide you towards your strategic objectives. They enable you to measure the impact you’re having, draw conclusions from experiments, and gain insights into people’s behaviours. Metrics are…

You failed. Doesn’t feel great to hear that, does it? So why should we use it to describe our experiments? Failed is an emotionally loaded word. It also sounds very terminal. Implying a sense of finality (and shame) from which there’s no return. However, one of the joys of working in the…