When Raising Prices Is Better Than Cutting Quality
Consumers may accept higher prices or smaller packages, but hidden quality cuts can damage trust and drive them away.
prodmgmt
The most important product decision is what you don’t build
Ask a team what they shipped this year and you’ll get a list. Ask what they killed and the room goes quiet.
Spirit Didn't Die From What You Think It Died From
On May 2, 2026, Spirit Airlines stopped flying. Roughly 300 flights and 60,000 passengers a day were instantly orphaned. Seventeen thousand people lost their jobs. United, Delta, JetBlue, and Southwest capped rebooking fares at around $200 one way, which is the closest thing a…
What is a product? - One more thing
While AI makes it easy to create prototypes, these are often not fully functional products. A real product requires users, a market, and solves real problems.
How a Fitted Product Category Learned to Sell Online - Retail Focus Magazine - Retail Design
For most of the last twenty years, tyres were held up as an example of a category that could not fully move online.
The One Thing Bringing Down Grocery Prices
Aldi is disrupting the U.S. grocery business
Better Than Free
In the analog world, it takes great effort to make a copy.
How Moats are Built
Building a moat is the difference between having fun with business, vs eating glass all day, every day, for years. This is how moats are actually built.
It’s also true that Power is much easier to identify than it is to build.
Bandag
Do Not Waste the Next 12 Months Building an Audience
7 Distribution Channels That Don’t Need a Single Follower
Intent Clusters Guide AI Product Discovery - Practical Ecommerce
AI's growth in search and shopping adds precision to intent behaviors and opportunities.
The Nut That Holds the Guardrail
A 97-year-old fastener manufacturer in Albion, Michigan, trading below book value with zero analyst coverage, just paid a special dividend.
Your North Star Metric is Lying to You
The measurement philosophy that blinds the room it’s supposed to illuminate
Why Costco pays $30/hr and Target doesn't
Costco is built different
🚀Guide to HW Product Requirements Documents (PRDs): Step 2 of Product Making
How to define a physical product concept and get it ready for execution.
Why Most Product Tours Get Skipped (and the One Pattern That Does Not)
Most users dismiss the first step of a product tour within seconds. Here is why that happens, what users do instead, and the one pattern that actually drives activation.
The Art of Discounting
Five strategies to drive volume and profit.
Avoid These Common Mistakes
The strategy must be designed to prevent (or more realistically, limit) those who would normally pay full price from taking advantage of a discount.
Your Glasses Got Worse On Purpose
How an Italian orphan built a $27 billion monopoly that controls the brands, the stores, the lenses, and the insurance.
Your Power Tools Got Worse On Purpose | Who Really Owns DeWalt, Craftsman, and Milwaukee?
How TTI and Stanley Black & Decker took the same playbook in opposite directions.
What Ghost Kitchens Got Wrong
Two good ideas and one bad mistake
Minimum Viable Product (MVP): Definition
MVPs are learning tools that test whether an idea is valuable to users.
How Invisalign Became the World’s Biggest User of 3D Printers
Joe Hogan, Align Technology’s plastics-nerd CEO, says you shouldn’t eat with your aligners and that you don’t need to wear your retainers every night.
Serval's Path to Product-Market Fit — Win Enterprise Buyers by Treating Them Like Consumers
Notes from an AI founder taking a swing at a hundred-billion-dollar incumbent.
The Sword of Damocles in Software
"GitHub Copilot had 20 million users. First to market. Then Claude Code arrived and installs peaked within six months. If the sword can cut the leader, no one is safe."
Loot Drop - The Startup Graveyard
Explore 925+ failed startups and learn from $32.5B+ in burned venture capital. Discover why they failed, their market potential, and how to rebuild them.
Lessons Learned Shipping 500 Units of my First Hardware Product
Building in consumer hardware as a software engineer
The Psychology Gap: Why Teams Misinterpret User Behavior - UX Magazine
Your product isn't failing because of bad design. It's failing because your team is designing in clarity while your users are drowning in chaos. The gap between how you think users behave and how they actually feel their way through your product is quietly breaking every flow…
Understanding carriage
The announcement of the planned Netflix acquisition of Warner Bros, one of the last remaining major studios, is shedding light on a key issue we often overlook when thinking about culture, creativi…
Why Small-Footprint Stores are Shaping Big City Retail - Retail Focus Magazine - Retail Design
Large cities move fast and need retail spaces that can keep up with shifting demand. Brands have started to rely on smaller stores that fit busy streets, tight corners, and varied foot traffic. Customers respond well to shops that feel simple, quick, and easy to use. These…
Turn Any Idea Into a Validated MVP
A step-by-step path to validate your idea fast by defining the problem, testing assumptions, prototyping the critical flow, and shaping a focused MVP you can learn from.
The Merger Playbook: Crossbeam’s CEO Breaks Down Every Detail of the Deal That Worked
A founder's firsthand account of how he merged with a competitor to materially change the trajectory of his company.
OpenAI’s Windows Play
OpenAI is making a play to be the Windows of AI: the all-encompassing platform that controls both hardware supplier and software developers.
Is Your Startup Idea Any Good? Borrow These Validation Tactics from the Founders of Linear, Mercury and More
Founders share the unconventional ways they found conviction in their startup ideas.
Do Things that Don't Scale
How to Sell if Your User is not the Buyer
Example: Dev = user; CTO = buyer
The Right Way to Sunset a Project
A four-part framework.
The Definitive HBR Strategy Glossary
Our guide to all things strategy, from “adjacency expansion” to “value stick.”
Most people who buy your game won’t play it – How To Market A Game
🎁 Guide to HW Product Quality
Ensuring users receive world-class products.
FMEAs
SPC
Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists | Holovaty.com
The Jobs to be Done Framework (to Understand Demand)
How and why the Jobs to be Done Framework can help you sell more, faster, and accelerate your understanding of demand.
Merchandising Lessons from Top Marketplaces
We analyze the home pages of 10 marketplaces to spot common merchandising traits.
The Man Who Beat IBM
Compaq’s Rod Canion broke Big Blue’s hold on the PC market—and changed computing forever
Cross-sell Tactics of Top DTC Brands
Our just-completed analysis of 40 direct-to-consumer brands revealed several cross-selling techniques.
The Silent Strain of Solo Product Managers
When brilliant work leads to breakdowns
Product Purgatory: When they love it but still don't buy
When even "free" is too expensive.
A Guide To Marketplaces-2nd Edition-03012018.pdf
Shared with Dropbox
Speedrunning the Skill of Demand
How to get better, faster at the skill of uncovering demand, which underpins the skill domains of sales, marketing, and product.
How to Structure a B2B Marketplace Venture | MIT Sloan Management Review
Companies that want to launch a B2B marketplace face a choice: own the platform, spin it off, or create a startup.
📈Product Market Fit for Physical Products
I asked an 🍎 Apple Vision Pro designer turned solopreneur how he sells HW.
Are Product Images Vital for Brick-and-Mortar Stores?
Regarding marketing and selling products to consumers, product imagery is unquestionably one of the most important selling points. When considering the prevalence and dominance of e-commerce and digital shopping channels, traditional brick-and-mortar retail stores may question…