Since I started in Duda, all the features I was involved in as a product manager were related to online payments: app store, client billing, e-commerce, and membership. I was also responsible to billing Duda users under a unique and complex billing scheme. In this post, I would like to share with product managers the knowledge I gained during this time. The following is some advice from my experience. Don’t repeat my mistakes! 🙂

Today I worked on improving my game UX. I started with a high-level sketch. Then reusing what even assets I can to reduce delivery times.

Finished creating the basic game loop as a minimal working software. The next step is improving the UX.

Two days ago, I worked on my new game idea for 60 minutes. In those 60 minutes, I put some key product management, lean, and agile principles into work.

As a hiring manager, I have read hundreds of product manager resumes. It is true, it takes me less than five seconds to decide if a resume is worth reading. I have noticed 3 key mistakes many product managers make and I would like to share them with you.

I think that product managers are seen too often as wizards: expected to move the needle from some internal intuition. I argue that product managers should be professionals.

This is the second post about presentations. You can read the first one in case you missed it.

As a product manager, you do a lot of presentations: to your fellow product managers, your squad, customer success, sales, marketing, and others. Looking at my calendar, I do one to three presentations each week. Not all of them are called ‘Presentation’, yet all of them share the notion of me presenting some content to the other participants and them responding in some way. Over the years I’ve come to realize that these meetings can be optimized. Meetings consume a lot of time, instead of a single person they involve a group, and every moment the meeting is not relevant to some of its participants is a waste of time and energy. I can bet that you and others within your organization would agree with the statement ‘we have too many meetings and some are a waste of time.’ You can do better.

One of the challenges product managers are facing is benchmarking KPIs and metrics. When you are about to release a new feature or product, what should you expect? What would be considered a success? Would 5% adoption be a great success or a complete failure? I think the reason product managers are having a hard time here is due to the fact the product metrics are deeply related to business data and results. Would you be willing to tell outsiders the current values of your product metrics and KPIs? Probably not, they’re too sensitive. Designers and developers enjoy the ability to share data and specifics regarding many challenges and issues they meet (not all of them). For product managers, it’s harder, as well as for other business-oriented positions like marketing or sales. (On a different topic, I think this is also why many product managers professional forums and conferences are lacking. No one can really ask about their issues since they don’t want to reveal sensitive information. So all you get is a series of highly generalized vague questions and replies, as well as presentations you can’t learn a lot from) One solution to this problem is looking into product reports that include benchmarks. Even though some of them may be too general for you, it is usually a good place to start. In this post I’ve collected some good reports I found interesting. I linked to each report and summarized the highlights.