Mike Arcuri

Ultimately, our job in product management is to make products that succeed in the market. So to me, that's always been the high order bit in prioritization and planning. If you're not delivering value to your customers, or the business model isn't sustainable, your product and team will fail. But the teams we work with also depend on having exec support, buy-in, and sponsorship. So you can't ignore this. You have to ensure that your exec stakeholders understand and agree with the team's strategy ...Read More

At Meta/Facebook we're lucky enough to have really good internal infrastructure for setting up experiments and evaluating results. So in recent years I've come to rely on these internal tools. At other companies, I've used analytics and optimization services like: Google Analytics/Firebase Optimizely Mixpanel ApSalar (now Singular) I would also expect great things from Statsig, but haven't used it yet myself. A few other points about planning experiments and your iteration strategy: Learn about ...Read More

When you're launching a new feature in an existing app, you clarify your goals for the launch. Some example goals could be: To validate that the new feature fully solves the "user problem" it was designed to solve To learn about demand for the new feature To test relevance of the feature to particular sub-audiences To improve your product's key metrics overall (increase engagement, improve retention). To resurrect churned users To convert more users from free to paid To grow your product's users ...Read More

This really depends on the maturity stage for your product. For 0-1 work in startups (new products, not-yet-released), I recommend the models explained by Steve Blank (e.g. customer development process, business model canvas). There are so many unknowns and intertwined hypotheses for brand new product ideas that all need to be validated, iterated on, and improved until the whole product concept and its acquisition and retention funnels are working. The business model canvas helps clarify the sco ...Read More

Each person in a leadership position has a unique personality and skillset. It's important they find ways to continue to offer their strengths to their team and product while also doing the job of a leader: providing direction and clarity, supporting team members of various skill levels and seniority, coaching team members, and giving them opportunities to learn and grow. In my case, I love thinking through potential visions and strategies, breaking them down into tactical plans, and actually ge ...Read More

I like to get as much input as is reasonable both internally and externally. Internal examples of stakeholder input: partnerships, sales, marketing, product support, operations, finance, data science, design, execs…  External sources of roadmap input: press reactions & professional product reviews, app store ratings and reviews, customers support requests, user research, inbound marketing research, and above all behavioral data from your logging/analytics. In terms of gates... during the pla ...Read More

Here's a rough e2e prioritization process: Set context with the team and your stakeholders on the overall business, product stage and strategy, key problems, behavioral data, and user research. Establish roadmap themes based on these key problems, needs, and opportunities. Engage everyone in brainstorming solutions for these important problems and opportunities. De-duplicate ideas and group brainstormed ideas/solutions together. Arrange projects ideas into an ordered list. Sort the list by both ...Read More

One piece of advice: Understand your product, organization, and company and what each of these needs to succeed. Then do that thing (at your appropriate job scope: product/org/company). A bit more detail: Consider doing a listening tour of your peers and reports in your first 30 days: What are they most worried about/hopeful for with you coming in? What’s the one thing they’d like to see you change? Keep the same? Your job is always to:  Build the right product. Build the right team. But your pr ...Read More

Three ways: Writing strategy docs Collecting strategy feedback from other people Monitoring your product metrics to track if your strategy is working Writing will help you clarify your thinking and give you a draft to "test" mentally against different frameworks and criteria (see my other answer about what makes for a good/strong product strategy). Feedback: Organizational and company leaders can give you helpful feedback (formally in group reviews, or informally on your drafts). Coworkers with ...Read More

Most situations don't have "one right" product strategy. Some market/product situations have several strong/good strategies. In other situations there may be no winning strategies for your company/team. But "how should we validate that our product strategy is good?" Let's look at 3 examples: (1) validating a new strategy you're considering, (2) validating a strategy the team is executing against but without market feedback yet, and (3) validating a strategy for which you can gather real customer ...Read More