Posts tagged "Customer Focus"

12 posts

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Platform Products Need to Earn Their Keep

8 min read

Platform products need empathy and accountability. Treat them like external products — measure impact, earn trust, and prove real value.

Every company wants to build platforms. Few succeed. The promise sounds irresistible: build it once, reuse it across teams, and move faster forever. But inside most enterprises, “platform” has become a buzzword attached to sprawling systems that no one loves and everyone tolerates. Some of these platforms thrive because they are built with empathy and clarity. Others limp along as corporate mandates — used begrudgingly, updated reluctantly, and funded indefinitely. I’ve seen both ends of...
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The Factory Robot for Apps

7 min read

Cloudflare’s VibeSDK acts like a factory robot for apps. It turns plain language into live software while teams stay focused on customer value.

Cloudflare announced a game-changing open source AI vibe-coding platform: VibeSDK. Think of it like a factory robot that understands plain language and builds the gadget you describe. You walk into a high-tech workshop and say, “I need a device that tracks expenses with clear charts.” The robot designs the blueprint, picks the parts, assembles the device, tests it, and rolls out a working demo in minutes. You request a tweak, and it updates the device...
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When Work Becomes the Practice

4 min read

Moving beyond the search for meaning to the practice of creating it. A product manager's reflection on making work matter, one sprint at a time.

A colleague and an inspiring leader, Puneet Maheshwari, recently wrote something about work and meaning that stopped me in my tracks. He talked about growing up around people who never had the luxury of romanticizing "meaning" in work. For them, work was survival and dignity. Nothing more, nothing less. His insight? The question isn't whether work is a means to an end, but which ends make the means worth it. When Time Disappears For me,...
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Outcomes Over Outputs For Real

7 min read

How to make outcomes real, align cross-functional teams, and still give leaders confidence with a dual lens scorecard, DORA metrics, and probabilistic forecasts.

Everyone in product circles nods when we say we focus on outcomes, not outputs. It sounds right. It signals maturity. Yet when the sprint boards fill up and deadlines loom, many organizations slip back into outputs, features shipped, story points burned, demos completed. The intent is good, but the execution gets hijacked by the process. There is so much to unpack here, I'm expecting several more posts in this series. Let's set the table first....
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The Hidden Cost of UX Friction in Enterprise Systems

4 min read

Enterprise systems often rely on mandates, not UX. But small friction compounds into real business risk. Here’s why PMs can’t ignore it.

Following up on my earlier piece: Build, Buy, or AI-Build, in which I noted Marty Cagan's view that AI will not easily replace enterprise solutions, even in the age of “vibe coding.” His reasoning is sound: enterprise products are deeply embedded in intricate workflows, with business rules and integrations that can’t be swapped out overnight. Today, tools like Copilot or low-code builders tend to play a helper role rather than a wholesale replacement. But this...
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One Question Every Product Manager Should Ask in Roadmap Reviews

2 min read

A simple question can sharpen roadmap reviews: what will this feature replace in the user’s life? Here’s why the replacement lens matters.

Roadmap reviews tend to focus on timelines, dependencies, and long lists of features. These discussions are important, but they often miss a single clarifying question that can cut through the noise: What will this feature replace in the user’s life? Asking this question changes the framing. Instead of thinking about what a feature adds, the conversation shifts to what it displaces. Users don’t have unlimited time or attention. Every new feature competes with something they...
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OpenAI’s GPT-realtime Brings a Step Forward in Voice AI

3 min read

OpenAI’s GPT-realtime unifies voice AI into a single model. See why its technical leap and early adopters make this the moment voice AI goes mainstream.

For years, voice AI has felt like a half-step behind its text-based counterpart. The standard architecture relied on a clunky chain: speech-to-text, a language model for reasoning, then text-to-speech. The result was often laggy, robotic, and disconnected from the flow of natural conversation. OpenAI’s new GPT-realtime changes that dynamic. By unifying speech recognition, reasoning, and speech synthesis into a single model, it eliminates the pauses and disconnects that made past systems frustrating. The model not...
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Why Customer Success Belongs at the Start of Product Strategy

7 min read

Shift-left Customer Success by embedding it early in product strategy, design, and GTM to boost retention and drive SaaS growth.

Customer Success (CS) is one of the most misunderstood roles in SaaS. As Saahil Karkera wrote in a widely shared LinkedIn post, one quarter CS teams are heroes; the next, they're blamed for churn, adoption drops, and burnout. This volatility exists because CS sits at the fault lines of Product, Sales, and Customer expectations. The solution isn’t hiring “miracle CSMs.” It’s treating Customer Success as a shift-left strategy—designed into product, GTM, and organizational incentives, not...
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Architect vs. Gardner: Product Development Mindsets

5 min read

Product leaders must know when to act as Architects and when to act as Gardeners. Learn how to balance precision and adaptability in product development.

Product development demands vision and execution. But the mindset you bring to the work often shapes outcomes as much as strategy or process. Two powerful metaphors illustrate this tension: the Architect and the Gardener. Both have value. Both can lead to success. But knowing when to adopt one mindset over the other—and how to balance them—can mean the difference between building structures that endure and nurturing products that adapt. The Architect Mindset Architects design with...
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Cultivating Strong Product Culture

5 min read

Learn how to cultivate a strong product culture by empowering teams, aligning leadership, and focusing on outcomes over features.

Culture may feel intangible, but in product organizations it’s one of the strongest predictors of success. Teams with the right culture move faster, make better decisions, and consistently build products that matter. Teams without it often drown in process, produce outputs that don’t add up, and lose trust with customers and stakeholders. A strong product culture doesn’t appear by accident. It is cultivated deliberately through leadership choices, organizational design, and team habits. Technology as an...
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Love the Problem, Solution will Follow

6 min read

Fall in love with the problem, not the solution. Learn seven techniques to uncover customer needs and build products that create lasting impact.

When you’re building a product, it’s easy to get excited about the “how.” The sleek design, the advanced tech stack, the long feature list. But here’s the hard truth that separates great products from forgettable ones: don’t fall in love with the solution; fall in love with the problem. This mindset shift can be the difference between a product that thrives and one that just exists. Albert Einstein once said, “If I had an hour...
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Beyond the Deliverable - The Strategic Product Mindset

4 min read

Learn how to move beyond delivery and adopt a strategic product mindset with practical steps, proven frameworks, and customer-first thinking.

"Strategic thinking." Sounds lofty, doesn’t it? The kind of thing we expect from leaders, not just order-takers. But here’s the truth: it’s not an inborn talent. It’s a skill that can be developed with deliberate practice. Like learning to ride a bike, or in our world, learning to ship something that truly matters. Too often, what gets labeled as “strategy” is really just a diagnosis or a broad policy statement. What’s missing are the coherent...
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