Rocketship.fm

We are in the middle of a massive shift in the way people use and buy software. ‍ It’s been well over a decade since Salesforce brought software to the cloud. Apple put digital experiences in people’s pockets back in 2009 with the first iPhone. Blake talks about how we’re in “The End User Era” -- which is a new era that we’re now living in.  We may be using applications for business purposes, but even those applications are adopted not because of some procurement manager signing a contract, but adopted from the bottom up within an organization.  “The End User Era” applies to business applications like Slack, Zoom, Calendly, and others that you probably use every day. This episode is brought to you by Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship. This episode is brought to you by Phrase. Do you have a product that you want to take to a global audience? Phrase will be your single point of truth for all of your translation projects. Go to phrase.com/rocketship to get your free Phrase account today. This episode is also brought to you by DigitalOcean, the cloud platform that makes it easy for startups to launch high performance modern apps and websites. Learn more about DigitalOcean and apply for Hatch at do.co/rocketship. This episode is also brought to you by .tech, where you can secure your .tech domain name today. Rocketship listeners can receive a 90% discount on their .tech domain names by going to go.tech/rocketship and using coupon code ROCKETSHIP.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Product Marketing. The subtle art of describing your product in a way that excites everyone around you. This isn’t just for entrepreneurs pitching investors, this is for product managers and product leaders to inspire their teams to push themselves to build the best possible solution. We walk through examples from Figure One, Facebook and Sono’s with us as we attempt to break down what makes a powerful product description and what are the elements you need to improve yours. This episode is brought to you by Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship. This episode is brought to you by Phrase. Do you have a product that you want to take to a global audience? Phrase will be your single point of truth for all of your translation projects. Go to phrase.com/rocketship to get your free Phrase account today. This episode is also brought to you by DigitalOcean, the cloud platform that makes it easy for startups to launch high performance modern apps and websites. Learn more about DigitalOcean and apply for Hatch at do.co/rocketship. This episode is also brought to you by .tech, where you can secure your .tech domain name today. Rocketship listeners can receive a 90% discount on their .tech domain names by going to go.tech/rocketship and using coupon code ROCKETSHIP.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jobs to be done will change the way you think about product. It will change the way you approach user personas and influence your product decision process. It is one of the most important developments in product thinking in our time, so today we're going to dive right in. In this episode we talk with Jeetu Patel of Box, Bob Moesta co-creator of the Jobs to be done framework, Benedikt Lehnert of Wunderlist (now Microsoft) and Eric White. The theory of jobs to be done was developed in part as a complement to the theory of disruptive innovation. But disruption theory doesn’t tell you how to create products and services that customers want to buy. Jobs to be done theory does. It transforms our understanding of customer choice in a way that no amount of data ever could, because it gets at the causal driver behind a purchase. This episode is brought to you by Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship. This episode is brought to you by Phrase. Do you have a product that you want to take to a global audience? Phrase will be your single point of truth for all of your translation projects. Go to phrase.com/rocketship to get your free Phrase account today. This episode is also brought to you by DigitalOcean, the cloud platform that makes it easy for startups to launch high performance modern apps and websites. Learn more about DigitalOcean and apply for Hatch at do.co/rocketship. This episode is also brought to you by .tech, where you can secure your .tech domain name today. Rocketship listeners can receive a 90% discount on their .tech domain names by going to go.tech/rocketship and using coupon code ROCKETSHIP.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Daria Axelrod Marmer, a Product Lead at Hubspot wrote about Killing it by Killing Features and we explore that more today. It's never fun to sunset a feature we worked so hard to bring to life, but sometimes growth comes from creating focus and removing unused features to either build something new or take a new approach to solve the problem they were meant to solve. This episode is brought to you by Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship. This episode is brought to you by Phrase. Do you have a product that you want to take to a global audience? Phrase will be your single point of truth for all of your translation projects. Go to phrase.com/rocketship to get your free Phrase account today. This episode is also brought to you by DigitalOcean, the cloud platform that makes it easy for startups to launch high performance modern apps and websites. Learn more about DigitalOcean and apply for Hatch at do.co/rocketship. This episode is also brought to you by .tech, where you can secure your .tech domain name today. Rocketship listeners can receive a 90% discount on their .tech domain names by going to go.tech/rocketship and using coupon code ROCKETSHIP.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ryan Singer and the Basecamp team have developed their own methodology for product planning. For one, they don't do waterfall or agile or scrum. For two, they don’t line walls with Post-it notes. For three, they don’t do daily stand ups, design sprints, development sprints, or anything remotely tied to a metaphor that includes being tired and worn out at the end. No backlogs, no Kanban, no velocity tracking, none of that. What they do instead is six week product builds followed by two weeks of cooling. Their leadership team decides how long they want to spend on tasks vs working with product estimates and if they work isn't done, it's thrown out. Today we sit down with Ryan Singer and learn more about his most recent book Shape Up which outlines this process. Read the full book at http://basecamp.com/shapeup. You can also join Ryan and Bob Moesta at their upcoming product seminar. This episode is brought to you by Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship. This episode is brought to you by Phrase. Do you have a product that you want to take to a global audience? Phrase will be your single point of truth for all of your translation projects. Go to phrase.com/rocketship to get your free Phrase account today. This episode is also brought to you by DigitalOcean, the cloud platform that makes it easy for startups to launch high performance modern apps and websites. Learn more about DigitalOcean and apply for Hatch at do.co/rocketship. This episode is also brought to you by .tech, where you can secure your .tech domain name today. Rocketship listeners can receive a 90% discount on their .tech domain names by going to go.tech/rocketship and using coupon code ROCKETSHIP.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mental models are simple expressions of complex processes or relationships. These models are accumulated over time by an individual and used to make faster and better decisions. Today to explore Mental Models for Product Leadership and how to use them with your team every day. This episode is also brought to you by Airtable, which is the all-in-one platform for product managers. Rocketship listeners can receive $50 in credit by signing up at Airtable.com/rocketship. This episode is also brought to you by DigitalOcean, the cloud platform that makes it easy for startups to launch high performance modern apps and websites. Learn more about DigitalOcean and apply for Hatch at do.co/rocketship. This episode is also brought to you by .tech, where you can secure your .tech domain name today. Rocketship listeners can receive a 90% discount on their .tech domain names by going to go.tech/rocketship and using coupon code ROCKETSHIP.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It's a skill, because of our modern times, that is becoming increasingly more difficult to achieve. Today we outline some helpful practices for staying focused and achieving deeper concentration on the work that matters. This episode is also brought to you by Airtable, which is the all-in-one platform for product managers. Rocketship listeners can receive $50 in credit by signing up at Airtable.com/rocketship. This episode is also brought to you by DigitalOcean, the cloud platform that makes it easy for startups to launch high performance modern apps and websites. Learn more about DigitalOcean and apply for Hatch at do.co/rocketship. This episode is also brought to you by .tech, where you can secure your .tech domain name today. Rocketship listeners can receive a 90% discount on their .tech domain names by going to go.tech/rocketship and using coupon code ROCKETSHIP.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we bring you the story of eBay and Amazon in the early 2000s, and how their fierce competition for market share came down to two very different product approaches. There's a winner, a loser and lots of product lessons in-between. We'll also share something that Jeff Bezos does to this day to ensure the customer is always represented in product meetings. This episode is brought to you by Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship. This episode is also brought to you by Airtable, which is the all-in-one platform for product managers. Rocketship listeners can receive $50 in credit by signing up at Airtable.com/rocketship. This episode is also brought to you by DigitalOcean, the cloud platform that makes it easy for startups to launch high performance modern apps and websites. Learn more about DigitalOcean and apply for Hatch at do.co/rocketship. This episode is also brought to you by .tech, where you can secure your .tech domain name today. Rocketship listeners can receive a 90% discount on their .tech domain names by going to go.tech/rocketship and using coupon code ROCKETSHIP.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A mental model is any concept that helps explain, analyze, or navigate the world. As product managers, our mental models drive our decision-making, the way we communicate and collaborate with others, and how we prioritize. Today we explore some essential mental models for Product Managers. From opportunity cost to confirmation bias to Semmelweis reflex and even key failure. There are countless mental models that are essential for Product Managers to understand. This episode is brought to you by Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship. This episode is also brought to you by Airtable, which is the all-in-one platform for product managers. Rocketship listeners can receive $50 in credit by signing up at Airtable.com/rocketship. This episode is also brought to you by DigitalOcean, the cloud platform that makes it easy for startups to launch high performance modern apps and websites. Learn more about DigitalOcean and apply for Hatch at do.co/rocketship. This episode is also brought to you by .tech, where you can secure your .tech domain name today. Rocketship listeners can receive a 90% discount on their .tech domain names by going to go.tech/rocketship and using coupon code ROCKETSHIP.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mental models are how we understand the world. Not only do they shape what we think and how we understand but they shape the connections and opportunities that we see. Mental models are how we simplify complexity, why we consider some things more relevant than others, and how we reason. A mental model is simply a representation of how something works. We cannot keep all of the details of the world in our brains, so we use models to simplify the complex into understandable and organizable chunks. Today we explore some of Charlie Munger's famous mental models as outlined in his speech "The Psychology of Human Misjudgment." This episode is brought to you by Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship. This episode is also brought to you by Airtable, which is the all-in-one platform for product managers. Rocketship listeners can receive $50 in credit by signing up at Airtable.com/rocketship. This episode is also brought to you by DigitalOcean, the cloud platform that makes it easy for startups to launch high performance modern apps and websites. Learn more about DigitalOcean and apply for Hatch at do.co/rocketship. This episode is also brought to you by .tech, where you can secure your .tech domain name today. Rocketship listeners can receive a 90% discount on their .tech domain names by going to go.tech/rocketship and using coupon code ROCKETSHIP.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Data is powerful because it is concrete. For many entrepreneurs and product people, empirical data can trump everything else – and it’s been an important tool in helping startups solve problems in new and innovative ways. In today's episode we talk with Richard White, the CEO of UserVoice, and what it means to be "data-informed" and how to better use data inside your organization. This episode is also brought to you by Airtable, which is the all-in-one platform for product managers. Rocketship listeners can receive $50 in credit by signing up at Airtable.com/rocketship. This episode is also brought to you by DigitalOcean, the cloud platform that makes it easy for startups to launch high performance modern apps and websites. Learn more about DigitalOcean and apply for Hatch at do.co/rocketship. This episode is also brought to you by .tech, where you can secure your .tech domain name today. Rocketship listeners can receive a 90% discount on their .tech domain names by going to go.tech/rocketship and using coupon code ROCKETSHIP.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Have you ever found yourself in the middle of where of those projects where you just go, I wish we’d seen how this would end at the beginning of the project? Often times this is the result of a build vs buy decision gone wrong. Today we discuss recognizing what isn’t your core competency. This can be difficult to admit for organizations, but getting this right could save you a ton of time, money and headache. Balancing your company’s immediate needs with its long-term growth is both paramount and challenging – especially if your business is a startup. Challenging questions arise, such as whether you should invest aggressively in long-term initiatives or take the less expensive and more conservative approach. The “build versus buy” decision is a significant one that many companies face when addressing their software needs. Today we breakdown the classic product decision. To build, or to buy. Or both? This episode is brought to you by Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship. This episode is also brought to you by Airtable, which is the all-in-one platform for product managers. Rocketship listeners can receive $50 in credit by signing up at Airtable.com/rocketship. This episode is also brought to you by DigitalOcean, the cloud platform that makes it easy for startups to launch high performance modern apps and websites. Learn more about DigitalOcean and apply for Hatch at do.co/rocketship. This episode is also brought to you by .tech, where you can secure your .tech domain name today. Rocketship listeners can receive a 90% discount on their .tech domain names by going to go.tech/rocketship and using coupon code ROCKETSHIP.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we explore the history of the Product Manager from it's early ideation by Neil McElroy to it's growth at Hewlett-Packard thru it's maturation at Microsoft and into today. We talk with former Microsoft Project Manager, Ellen Chisa, Former Microsoft Engineer (and 55th hire), Mark Zbikowski and Matt LeMay, the Author of Product Management in Practice, about this evolution over the past 80 years. For Neil McElroy the Brand Men were essentially his manifesto on what would become a product manager today.  Their responsibilities ranged from tracking sales to managing the product, advertising and promotions. They were to “take full responsibility” for the brands implementation of advertising and sales and take a ‘huge weight’ off of the sales managers who were both ideating and implementing growth strategies. Bill Hewlett and David Packard interpreted the Brand Man ethos as putting decision making as close as possible to the customer, and making the product manager the voice of the customer internally. In the book The Hewlett-Packard Way this is credited with sustaining Hewlett-Packard’s 50 year record of unbroken 20% year-on-year growth between 1943 and 1993. This episode is brought to you by Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at Gusto.com/rocketship. This episode is also brought to you by Airtable, which is the all-in-one platform for product managers. Rocketship listeners can receive $50 in credit by signing up at Airtable.com/rocketship. This episode is also brought to you by DigitalOcean, the cloud platform that makes it easy for startups to launch high performance modern apps and websites. Learn more about DigitalOcean and apply for Hatch at do.co/rocketship. This episode is also brought to you by .tech, where you can secure your .tech domain name today. Rocketship listeners can receive a 90% discount on their .tech domain names by going to go.tech/rocketship and using coupon code ROCKETSHIP.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Connie Kwan walks us through her philosophy on storytelling for Product people, teaches us the essential elements of product storytelling and gives relatable use cases. This episode is brought to you by Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at Gusto.com/rocketship. This episode is also brought to you by Airtable, which is the all-in-one platform for product managers. Rocketship listeners can receive $50 in credit by signing up at Airtable.com/rocketship. This episode is also brought to you by DigitalOcean, the cloud platform that makes it easy for startups to launch high performance modern apps and websites. Learn more about DigitalOcean and apply for Hatch at do.co/rocketship. This episode is also brought to you by .tech, where you can secure your .tech domain name today. Rocketship listeners can receive a 90% discount on their .tech domain names by going to go.tech/rocketship and using coupon code ROCKETSHIP.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Adobe's transition into a SASS company wasn't easy. It took two painful years of losses to transition their entire business from one-time upfront pricing to a monthly subscription. For a publically traded company, this could have been the death of them. But long-term thinking and well-executed plan set them up for success into the foreseeable future. This episode is also brought to you by Airtable, which is the all-in-one platform for product managers. Rocketship listeners can receive $50 in credit by signing up at Airtable.com/rocketship. This episode is also brought to you by DigitalOcean, the cloud platform that makes it easy for startups to launch high performance modern apps and websites. Learn more about DigitalOcean and apply for Hatch at do.co/rocketship. This episode is also brought to you by .tech, where you can secure your .tech domain name today. Rocketship listeners can receive a 90% discount on their .tech domain names by going to go.tech/rocketship and using coupon code ROCKETSHIP.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices