When I first heard the phrase “coin-operated salesperson”, I thought it was a rather derogatory term but I guess that’s what makes a good salesperson. It’s the sales function to “chase the dollar” so I never really gave it another thought. Recently, I have been wondering, in a product-led world…

This is an incredibly biased commentary about Duolingo’s product right after the IPO. I am a huge fan of this product (not just as a consumer, but also as a product manager).

Not every growth engine works for every product. A referral engine is one such tool in your toolbelt. In this post, I will highlight some key characteristics of referral models. Common Variables Most referral programs have generalizable variables that need to be considered:

When we think of “product debt”, we tend to default to only technical issues such as scaling your servers or refactoring your code. There are many types of debts. You will take some of them on- intentionally or not. Let’s start with some definitions Debt Debt is a deferred payment, or…

Engineering in marketing is such an underutilized resource for software companies. This isn’t a post about “Growth Hacking” or about the “intersection” between product and marketing. I’m not sure if there is an industry term for it yet but it sits somewhere outside of your product and before your marketing…

We are abusing prototypes. (I mean as an industry, not just me personally) Prototypes are cheap and easy ways to test product usability. 1. Some things are NOT worth testing They shouldn’t be used to test (a) Desirability of a product idea (b) Well-established interactions (e.g. logins) (c) Single page applications They should be used to test (a)…

It’s trite at this point to say “Launch quickly and Fail fast”. We all know the following quotes: Move fast and break things. - Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late - Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn & Paypal Mafia …

We all have this fear when we start out. Our MVPs are feature-poor and only serve a small segment of the entire user base. When compared to more mature products, you might think… “This is just a feature” Not every feature will make it to product-market fit BUT, I think…

I always start from the Jobs-to-be-done framework. I don’t think that great startup ideas pop out of nowhere- I think they are discovered by observing jobs that arise in the world. By the way, that’s also how we decided to build avopos. Great products (or services) succeed because they do…