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Practical Product #1: Jason Evanish's Product newsletter
Published about 2 months ago • 8 min read
Practical Product Volume I
Hi Reader-
I'm starting a newsletter and today is the first edition.
I know there's a lot of product content out there, but what's missing is a discussion of the practical, real life challenges out there, and what to do about them.
As the old saying goes, “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.”
My goal with this newsletter is to dive into the nuance of product management and give you practical help, so you can actually go apply what I write about to your job.
A few notes about how these will be written:
A focus on SaaS: I've spent my career on subscription products (both consumer and B2B, though mostly B2B)
A focus on the early stages: I've been a founder, first PM, and coached clients that had up to hundreds of employees. My advice will be through that lens.
Brevity over long form: I've written thousands of essays, usually over 2,000 words long. Here I aim to be much more succinct, and link out to long form content when more detail is justified.
Let’s dive in…
Table of contents:
🥘 Food for Thought on Buyers vs. End Users
⚙️ What Grinds my Gears on the Product Interview Process
💡 What I Learned from Lenny & Marty Cagan's interview
❓ Practical Q&A on Reply in with Your Questions!
📖 Your Practical Post on Ways to Find Your First Customer
🥘 Food for Thought on theImportance of Understanding Buyers vs. End Users
The importance of buyers vs. end users has been coming up all over for me lately. I saw this tweet yesterday, and it's come up with a number of my clients recently as they try to go up market.
As Jen describes above, the buyer and end user can be very different depending on the size of company you're dealing with. The vertical can change this distance significantly, too:
A VP of Sales used to be a Sales person, so has some empathy and interest in their needs.
The Head of HR often has never been a manager, and not worked in many of the departments they interact with. They take no consideration for what employees need when they buy performance management software.
A CTO was once an engineer, so again, has some proximity and understanding of the end user. They may even be both.
The IT head often has little contact with the end users he's buying and implementing a solution for.
What does this mean for PMs like you? A few important things:
Get to know BOTH your buyer & end user: Only investing time in interviewing, understanding, and building features for one of them is a recipe for disaster. Ignore the buyer and your big deals won't materialize. Ignore end users and they'll revolt against your product.
Remember who has the purse strings: Bottoms up SaaS is great until companies lock down company credit cards and tighten budgets. You need to solve a key problem for the buyer, not just have a product beloved by end users.
Beware going up or down market: As Jen highlights, who the buyer is, and how far away from the end user they are, varies depending on the size of companies you're targeting. This is just the tip of the iceberg of how your product has to evolve when you go a step up or down in the market.
If you're a product manager looking to rise to the higher levels of leading strategy, and setting long term goals for your product organization, you must absolutely understand what all of this means, and how you need to adjust your roadmaps, priorities, and initiatives to your company's current buyer vs. end user situation.
What questions and challenges do you have about dealing with buyers vs. end users?
Reply and I'll work the answers into future editions of this newsletter.
⚙️ What Grinds My Gears: theProduct Interview Process
This section is going to be rants, complaints, and hard critiques I have about the product management industry as a whole.
If you remember Family Guy, this is inspired by Peter Griffin's rants:
And today, I'm talking about the Product Management Interview Process.
Today's Grind: Product Management Interviewing is almost universally terrible 🤢
For an industry that prides itself on being self taught, using data, iterating, and bringing a learning mindset, it's stunning to me just how bad the product management interview process really is.
Over my 15 years in the industry, I've been on my share of interviews, and have heard so many disheartening experiences from other PMs.
A few of the issues I've seen that are all too common:
A focus on credentials over capability: Everyone is self-taught to be a PM. You can't major in it, yet I've seen many companies filtering for Harvard, MIT, or Stanford degrees, or having worked at the day's hottest unicorns, never even giving a look at others regardless of their talent, skills, and knowledge.
A failure to respond: The number of PM hiring managers I've known who never check the applicants coming into their system, despite also telling people at networking events and online to apply that way is maddening. It's lazy and disrespectful, especially when those same leaders get angry when they're contacted by applicants via Twitter, Linkedin, or other means.
Completely broken assignments: A good assignment is a great way to evaluate people when they're like the real work you're hiring for. Sadly, most assignments are poorly thought out, unrelated to the job (i.e.- like a refrigerator challenge for a project management product 😖), and are way out of balance between the work requested and how much attention the interview team gives it.
Absurd hypotheticals: The questions I've heard and friends have complained about being asked are also frustrating. Does guessing the total number of websites on the Internet, or ping pong balls on a school bus, have anything to do with being a good PM? There's plenty of data now showing these questions don't help, just stroking the ego of the interviewer, yet I still often hear about their use.
What does this all mean? OPPORTUNITY!
If you're hiring for PMs, realize the bar is so low. To stand out, all you have to do is:
Review your ATS and send default decline messages: This avoids people getting that feeling their resume went into a black hole. Best of all, it literally takes you 10 seconds if you have an Applicant Tracking System (ATS), because they have a button you can click with a setting to send a template message.
Reward results over credentials: It's amazing how many PMs have built their career over simply shipping anything. You can find gems by focusing on those that can describe specific wins and impacts on company KPIs on their resumes and in the interviews.
Give real assignments: You can make interviewing a net value add for your team by literally talking about your problems in the interviews. Then, even if they don't work out, you're getting interesting ideas and new perspectives you can use.
Treat people with respect: For a job where we're supposed to show empathy and understanding for our customers, it seems many PMs have forgotten that interview candidates are their customer here. If you simply treat them with respect, don't ghost on any step, and try to be fair, you'll stand out by a mile.
Do these things, and you'll find more, high quality talent than most, and develop a reputation in the industry that will make more people want to apply and work with you in the future.
What would you add to the problems of the product management interview process?
What's an interview experience you LOVED that you wish more companies would do?
It does an excellent job of answering some key questions I think have crossed every PM's mind:
Is AI going to replace Product Managers? (Short answer: Only PMs who are glorified project managers)
What skills provide the best job security for PMs? (Spoiler: It's what I write about often: know your customers!)
What separates good and bad product roles? (Great for considering your career and the orgs you build)
Marty (the OG that wrote Inspired) really didn't hold back, which I think is important because he's got the best vantage point of probably anyone in the world on product management given his incredible client list and thousands of PMs he's worked with over the years.
So add this to your podcast queue, and save a few minutes to reflect on what they talk about.
❓ Practical Q&A on <Your Questions Here>
I also write a newsletter on leadership and management for my company, Lighthouse, and one of the popular sections is "Ask Lighthouse", where we talk about reader write-in questions.
I'd like to offer the same here in this newsletter, so shoot me your toughest or most important questions about product.
📖 Your Practical Post on 95 Ways to Find Your First Customers
This week's Practical Post is a real classic. One day, Hiten Shah and I were having tea at Samovar (as we often did when I worked for him) and we were lamenting how so many founders struggle finding their first customers.
Both of us thought there were *plenty* of ways to do so. And so we started rattling off a bunch of them and the list got pretty long.
Now, this post is dated. I made it in 2013. I'm going to be updating it soon and I'd love your help.
As you read it, if you have suggestions, reply and let me know your favorite tactic. I'll give you credit for the tactic and link to whatever one site/podcast/X/linkedin/etc you'd like.
And in the meantime, get inspiration for your next project (or share with a friend) to get your first customers faster:
How was the first edition of this newsletter? What should I change, add, remove, or improve?
I appreciate ALL of your feedback, so whether it's fonts, colors, and design, or a section topic you'd love to see, or something else that inspires you, please reply and share.
My goal is to make this a newsletter you always want to open and that you find yourself sharing with fellow product people.
Practical, tactical insights for SaaS Product Managers
Join thousands of managers learning how to become great product leaders by signing up to receive the weekly Practical Product newsletter as well as long form blog posts by Jason Evanish.
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