FAQs on Great Products

The following is taken from What Makes a Great Product.

At Products That Count, we view product metrics through 3 lenses:

• acquisition – how are you doing acquiring customers?
• engagement – how engaged are your users?
• monetization – how is the product doing making money?

Metrics gauging the success of your product should have been called out in the business case. They will vary by industry and product, but often include the following:

• Financial – revenue, expense, profit, gross margin
• Market – # customers, market share, growth rate, Monthly Active Users (MAU – paid and free)
• Customer – NPS, performance, reliability/quality, product usage

To be of value, a metric must provide insights and be actionable.

Three out of four product managers have been in their roles for two years or less. This can often result in many PMs acting more like project managers or order takers than product managers. Oftentimes, this will lead to building what the Sales or Engineering teams ask for, rather than what the market dictates. Additionally, once they know the basics of their craft, they jump ship to join firms with strong product cultures.

Read Ramifications of Ineffective Product Management to get a broader picture of why poorly trained and poorly mentored product managers are ineffective and cause products to fail.

Ineffective product management comes at a cost. For starters, one in three product launches fail. Additionally, there is a 30 percent lost Product Team & Engineering throughput and significant missed revenue. This is especially painful in a recession where the company needs every team to be highly productive and effective. On top of that, the success of digital transformations is threatened by low-performing Product teams.

Employees recognize when a Product team is not effective and will begin to search for another job, resulting in a ~30% turnover rate within the Product team. This hinders the ability to correct the problem as frequently it is the best product managers that leave.

See both of these articles to understand more about ineffective product management:

• The Ramifications of Ineffective Product Management
• The Solution to Ineffective Product Management

The first steps to prevent failure is to understand the Characteristics of a Great Product and Why Products Fail.

The Strategic Bootcamp Product Management Course with Personalized Mentoring from Products That Count enables any organization to learn the craft of product management through a personalized, scalable approach. This isn’t one-time self-guided training, which typically fails.

The Bootcamp has 3 distinct capabilities:

• World-class content from influential product executives at the most innovative companies.
• Depth on product topics from all industries, geographies, and stages of maturity.
• Progressive programs to continuously stay sharp, deepen knowledge and grow impact.

The Products That Count approach is scalable, for companies big and small. It’s personalized (versus cookie cutter), with unique content that is tailored to your product teams. It’s also a continuous learning experience (i.e., ongoing, versus one-time), with new content being refreshed monthly.

We also understand that everyone learns differently. That’s why we offer content in many forms. There is content available to be consumed by listening, watching, reading, or interacting live at a webinar or during an Ask Me Anything (AMA) session.

For details, see Personalized Product Mentorship at Scale.

Companies that have participated in the program saw

• a 30% increase in productivity of the a PM and Engineering teams
• 9 out of 10 customers saw increased productivity in <30 days
• 30% boost in growth mindset, i.e. innovation, within 3 months

For information on building great products, see

• What Makes a Great Product
• Designing Great Products
• Building Great Products
• Launching Great Products

Products That Count has thousands of free resources to help you build great products. Our podcasts, eBooks, videos, articles, blogs, and infographics will help you learn the craft of product.

Check out the following pages:

• What Makes a Great Product – Start with understanding the characteristics of a product people don’t want to put down.
• Design Great Products – Best Practices for designing the Best Products.
• Building Great Products – Build the products you envision and the market wants.
• Launching Great Products –  Kickstart Sales with a launch that creates a buzz in the market.

as well as these podcasts and videos from our network of 300K+ product experts:

• Building Great Products With Christina Lucey of Credit Karma
• Squarespace Fmr Product Lead on Building Great Creative Products
• Product Awards Series: MURAL VP of Product on Playing to Wow
• The Most Powerful Question in Product Management: Why
• RBC Product Leader on Product Analytics: Why, What, When, and How to Use Data to Make Great Products
• Yelp Product VP Eric Singley on What Makes Great Products