The Mobile Spoon

Roundups season continues here at the mobile spoon, and this time I've collected a few posts about product management, as founders of your own startups or as product leaders in bigger companies. 
Let’s dig in:

Product management basics Let’s start with some basics:


B2B vs. B2C What’s the difference between managing B2B and B2C products?
Here are 5 things I’ve learned when I switched from a large B2B company to a small B2C startup. 

Product management is all about decisions Unfortunately, in most cases, there isn’t a right or wrong decision, just a set of priorities and constraints. To become a great product manager, you need to get into the right mindset and turn tradeoffs and compromises into your best friends. 

How do you prioritize your product backlog?  There are plenty of methods to prioritize product activities. Here are 5 unusual product management techniques you should try out someday. 

Product management is about improving conversion rates Learn how to use these 84 cognitive b…

20 rules for designing and developing great data tables. 

Tables and grids have always been an important UI component for products and dashboards.
And yet, even today, it’s easy to find data tables that are badly designed or deliver an inadequate user experience.

I came up with the idea to write this UI guide (which was written a thousand times before, but not as brilliantly as I'm going to write it...) while doing some maintenance work for our product (yeah, in our startup, the most senior person does the cleaning...).

Anyway...

I went through over 30 different SeaS tools and SDKs that we're using and played with their dashboards to review some numbers, collect some insights, and make minor modifications. I couldn’t help but notice how bad those tables were implemented, in terms of UI design and basic functionality (and those are good Saas products I'm talking about).

Given that I’ve been developing (and using) tables for 20 years (yes, I know I'm old, one day you'…

Entrepreneurs and product leaders are well-trained to relentlessly prioritize the important stuff, and say no to everything else.

And yet, despite using countless prioritization tools and decision-making frameworks, we are often caught off-guard, allowing our human weaknesses and cognitive biases to get in our way and make bad product decisions.

Often enough, those bad decisions mean bad features sneaking into the product making it cluttered, lacking a coherent experience, and practically making it worse.

Here are 7 deadly sins that invite bad features to sneak into your product:

1. Ego  There’s nothing like inflated ego to make good entrepreneurs behave like rock stars seeking personal glory.



When the “me” part comes before everything else (company, users, employees), bad features are invited into the product for the sake of creating a buzz, being trendy, trying to get noticed and becoming famous.

The thing about ego is that it usually comes with other destructive characteristics suc…

Lately, I had a chance to help a few developers and product managers with their CVs.

After spending years going over resumes, I got to the conclusion that even the brightest people, who know how to design, develop, and promote their products, face some difficulties when it comes to promoting themselves.

So I came up with this notion that CVs are just like products, and product people of all, can exploit the similarities to make their CVs stand out and convert better.

Let’s dive into the details:

Know your user  Let’s start with the personas: HR managers, recruiters, ATS bots, and hiring managers.
There are many practical tips on how to get past the ATS bots into the human hands. These guides usually focus on including accurate keywords across the resume and/or in a dedicated summary section. Personally speaking, I hate buzzwords, so as a general guideline I would suggest to manage them like SEO: you must include them, but don’t overuse or repeat them too much.

In this post, I will foc…

Trust plays a critical role when purchasing products online, but trusting the brand is not enough when booking a vacation or even ordering a massage at home, as the supplier in these cases is not the brand itself.

93% of consumers use online reviews to support their purchasing decisions; they seek for reassurance, a social proof that the product or service they plan to order is indeed the quality they expect it to be.

Rating and review systems are expected to be accurate because they are based on high volumes, however, as we learned over the years of operating our marketplace for beauty and lifestyle services - this is not always the case.

The problem When we started Missbeez, we knew we were dealing with a sensitive business.
Haircuts, makeups, massages, even nail treatments - those are all personal treatments, and therefore our customers were concerned about who’s coming over, their work quality and their experience.

The more expensive or personal a product is - the more sensitive use…

Product management is all about dealing with decisions, priorities, trade-offs, and compromises.
And yet, I’ve seen product people who focus so much on their product, that they often forget how to work with people.

Call it soft skills, intercommunication skills, it doesn’t matter. It’s the kind of things you need be aware of and work on, in order to become a good manager.

Here are 5 basic behavioral mistakes product managers still make, followed by some practical tips:
Mistake #1: Talking instead of listening  As a product manager, a big part of your knowledge comes from listening to others, and yet - many product people feel obliged to do the talking (and miss the opportunity to shut the fu🤭ck up).

Whether you are talking to customers, partners, sales, support - let them share their knowledge, pains, challenges, goals, and use this invaluable information to shore up your market understanding and connect the dots required to build a successful product.
THE QUIETER YOU BECOME, THE MOR…