Our Blog
April 2023
Product development strategies at different stages of your startup? – (Stage 1 -Problem/Solution Fit)
The way you build products differs drastically depending upon the stage your product is in. As founders, one must strive to work at all the stages of the product lifecycle to have lived a fulfilling career. We intend to write a series of blog posts on managing different stages of the product. This one starts with products in pre-product/market fit stage, intended mostly for early stage startups. Part 1 - Product Management at Problem/Solution Fit Getting to product/market fit is the first significant milestone of a startup, however, there are important milestones to cross even before that - the problem/solution fit stage. This stage usually...
ProductSquad’s Product Building Philosophy
We would like to write our philosophy in a style inspired by the lyrics of Frankie Laine, in his song, I Believe. On Building Products We believe in building products that make the world a better place. We use Nir Eyal’s Manipulation Matrix to stay the course. We believe that your product is not “the product”. Your business model is “the product”. — Inspired by Ash Maurya. Closely related to this is also the concept of Whole Product Model that we are keenly focussed about, which increases possibility of mainstream market success. We believe my primary identity is of being a value creator for my...
Why at ProductSquad, we are upbeat about Impact Mapping?
One of my partners at ProductSquad once passed a remark that I suffer from Shiny Object Syndrome. And that I always am distracted by a new framework, a new idea, a new phenomenon, or a new approach of doing things and that according to him this was not always a good thing. Though I partially agree with his remark that the cost of being overtly curious is that you meet a lot of bad ideas. But that doesn't mean you stop being overtly curious and stop the habit of exploring them. It's only be exploring would you chance upon something...
A primer on the Whole Product Model
When I mentioned about the whole product concept on my article on product philosophy, I received a few enquiries about what the whole product concept was. In this post, I attempt to describe the concept in reasonable measure. I derive my knowledge of the concept from the marketing classic, Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore. However, the topic was first introduced to me by Prabhakar Gopalan, an accomplished product leader in our podcast interview. The whole product concept is the most useful marketing constructs in high-tech products. The concept is very straightforward - there is a gap between the marketing promise...
The Power of Building Less
Over the years, I have found one consistent feedback from different functional teams in different organizations, both startups and large organizations. Almost everyone complains about development resource being under-resourced and not building enough to meet the market need. While I used to give it a serious thought earlier, over time I have come to consider it as an anti-pattern. The problem often is less about not being able to build more. One of the profound lessons for me has been realising the virtue of building less. I gathered this while reading Jeff Patton's User Story Mapping. When I understood the idea...