I use a lot of real-world analogies to describe abstract or digital experiences. Lately, I’ve spoken with a number of founders, Customer Success leaders, and growth PMs about great customer (and product) onboarding. The 2 weird analogies that keep coming up in rotation: 1. Turn your buffet into a Prix Fixe Products are like buffets. Features are usually…

If onboarding is hard to do well, then “everboarding” is a whole new frontier. Put simply, everboarding is the idea that onboarding and activating customers never stops. Why? For one, your product keeps changing. Every time a new feature is launched, existing customers have to be “onboarded” to the new…

First of all, what is onboarding? For all the talk about how PMs at every company are different, a lot of the problems we solve are the same. One of the most common and critical projects a PM will work on over their career is product onboarding, either because they join a team owning the new…

When I first became a product manager, the biggest skepticism I faced was that I didn’t have a technical background. …

Across 3 companies where I’ve been a product manager, tracking tasks (whether eng tickets or project tasks) has always been a core part of being a PM. At Teespring, we used Jira and seemingly scientific methods of estimating story points with the whole dev team ro-sham-bo’ing Fibonnaci numbers. At Intercom…

An interview with Rohini Pandhi, product lead at Square — Adam Grant in his book Originals, shows us that many of the people we consider great innovators didn’t just strike gold at the first shot — they were deeply prolific. Mozart composed over 600 pieces, Edison, over 1000 patents. Moreover, it wasn’t just about being prolific in a single style…

The people working on Bento have spent our careers working in cross-functional teams. None of us have built, shipped, or sold something on our own. Yet projects and initiatives come saddled with memories of “overhead”, “process”, “chaos” and “nagging.” We want to be empowered with the right context to do…

“Scaling” is one of those buzzy words thrown around in the startup community. It’s used to mean a host of things like scaling technical infrastructure, hiring people (and hiring processes), being more cost-effective with customer acquisition, etc. It’s so buzzy, that one of Sarah Cooper’s 10 Tricks to Appear Smart…

For PMs, designers or engineers, receiving customer feedback can elicit a range of emotions ranging from “Great! Let’s add it like all the other suggestions and we can prioritize later” to “Ignore it! The customer doesn’t know what they’re talking about anyway. That feature makes no sense.” The product culture…