Rocketship.fm

Google+ was an ambitious project to take down the social networking giant Facebook, unfortunately we all know how it ended. What went wrong along the way that prevented a company like Google, with seemingly endless resources and internet reach, fail to create a product users actually wanted to use? BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by: Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship. Product Institute is an online course for new and tenured product managers. Head to productinstitute.com and enter the code ROCKET at checkout, you'll receive $200 off your subscription. Augusto Digital. Augusto Digital is a product engineering team that create

In the early 2000's eBay was in direct competition with Amazon but they had very different methodologies when approaching the market. Today we dive into some of the mistakes eBay made in this time where they caught themselves focusing on the wrong metrics and ultimately the wrong side of the market. These mistakes ultimately led to the huge differences in the trajectory of where these companies are today. We talk with Ben Foster, the CPO at GoCanvas, about his time at eBay from 2001-2005 where he lead the "findings" team internally. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by: Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship. Product Institute is a

It was November of 2014 and Brian Crofts was preparing for a meeting with two senior executives at Intuit. One was his boss, CeCe Morken, who ran Intuit’s Professional Tax (ProTax) business line, the $422 million business that sold tax preparation software to professional accountants. The other was Sasan Goodarzi, who ran Intuit’s $1.8 billion TurboTax business (TurboTax) that sold software to consumers.  Crofts had devoted three years to a new product-- TurboTax PersonalPro -- that was a stepping stone in between these two business lines. The company’s leadership had decided it was an appropriate time for a major roll-out of the product and the purpose of the November meeting was to discuss and decide upon a go-to-market plan for PersonalPro.  But not all launches create hockey stick growth. Find out what happened behind the scenes when Intuit rolled out TurboTax PersonalPro the led to its initial failure. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40

Business schools around the nation study Webvan’s overly ambitious rush to the biggest IPO to date in Silicon Valley, as a prime example of what to avoid doing while scaling.While it’s true that the impatience to go public helped steer Webvan off a cliff, the once darling company made three critical, but often overlooked mistakes when it came to revolutionizing home grocery deliveries. We'll talk with Ben Foster about his experience leading product teams at Webvan. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by: DigitalOcean, the cloud platform that makes it easy for startups to launch high-performance modern apps and websites. Learn more about DigitalOcean and apply for Hatch at do.co/rocketship. App & Flow. If you're a startup founder, App

Everyone fails at some point in their career. Small failures, big failures. We're going to cover them all on this season of Rocketship. Today Michael Sacca and Mike Belsito are going to discuss some of their own product failures - from eFunneral, to Crew to Brandisty they've learned a lot from these mistakes. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by: Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship. DigitalOcean, the cloud platform that makes it easy for startups to launch high-performance modern apps and websites. Learn more about DigitalOcean and apply for Hatch at do.co/rocketship. App & Flow. If you're a startup founder, App & Flow will help

Right before we kick off Season 8 of Rocketship, we wanted to go back and look at some of our favorite episodes of the past 6 years. From relationships to product love, the history of the baseball cap to the first ever e-commerce website on the internet today we have something for in this episode. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. Listen to the full episodes: Relationships http://rocketship.fm/episodes/chapter_7_relationships/ Twitter Confessionals http://rocketship.fm/episodes/twitter_confessionals/ The Evolution of the Baseball Cap http://rocketship.fm/episodes/the_evolution_of_the_baseball_cap_product_ep_1/ The Untold Story Of Books.Com http://rocketship.fm/episodes/the_untold_story_of_books_com_part_1/ http://rocketship.fm/episodes/the_untold_story_of_b

With companies such as Google and Facebook we are trading our data in exchange for the benefits of their product, is the solution to stop giving big companies our information, or is it about recognizing how companies are using our data and making a conscience decision of what information we give away? We tackle these questions and more on this week's episode. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by: Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship. DigitalOcean, the cloud platform that makes it easy for startups to launch high-performance modern apps and websites. Learn more about DigitalOcean and apply for Hatch at do.co/rocketship. App & Flow

In the second part of our series on data we talk about the origins of Hadoop, the technology that formed the very foundation of what we know as “big data”. The emergence of Hadoop represents perhaps the single most important development in our lifetimes for storing, processing, and retrieving big data. And not only is this technology behind just about everything you touch on the web, it’s now even being used in the medical field to save lives. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. Including interviews with Vas Natarajan of Accel Ventures and Amr Awadallah of Cloudera. *** This show is a part of the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. We encourage you to visit the website and sign up for our newsletter for more informa

Today we talk with Ben Foster the Chief Product Officer at GoCanvas and former product manager at Ebay. Ben is a wealth of Product knowledge and experience and today we discuss the topic of A/B testing and how he's evolved his focus to be vision driven so that he doesn't miss the big opportunities to solve customer problems. This was a hard learned lesson and we hear about his experience A/B testing features with moderate success and what caused him to shift if focus. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by: Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship. Logi Analytics, which is offering 5 free reports – from analysts like Gartner and Dresne

Today we explore the history of the Product Manager from it's early ideation by Neil McElroy to it's growth at Hewlett-Packard thru it's maturation at Microsoft and into today. We talk with former Microsoft Project Manager, Ellen Chisa, Former Microsoft Engineer (and 55th hire), Mark Zbikowski and Matt LeMay, the Author of Product Management in Practice, about this evolution over the past 80 years.  For Neil McElroy the Brand Men were essentially his manifesto on what would become a product manager today. Their responsibilities ranged from tracking sales to managing the product, advertising and promotions. They were to “take full responsibility” for the brands implementation of advertising and sales and take a ‘huge weight’ off of the sales managers who were both ideating and implementing growth strategies. Bill Hewlett and David Packard interpreted the Brand Man ethos as putting decision making as close as possible to the customer, and making the product manager the voice of the customer internally. In the b

We all think we know everything there is to know about our customers, but data shows that we often know a surprising little amount about who our customers really are. We tend to get complacent and continue building for the personas that we think use our product, but is there a better way? We talk with Laura Klein, author of UX for Lean Startups and Build Better Products, about methods for better user research practices we can all start doing today. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship. This episode is brought to you by Logi Analytics, which is offering 5 free reports – from analysts like Gartn

Love isn’t rational. It doesn’t always make sense. But when love is in the air, nothing can come between you and a public tweet. Today we talk to people who’ve professed their love, publicly, for products they love. We discuss why they love the products they love, and what about these companies and brands gets them so excited. We dove into tech brands like Slack and Intercom as well as roll-on deodorant brand Phresh and personal fashion brand Stitch Fix. Huge thanks to our guests today: Lindsey Smith: https://twitter.com/LindseySmithHHC, Jordi Romero: https://twitter.com/jordiromero, Natalie Gerke: https://twitter.com/Ngerke, & Alys Gagnon: https://twitter.com/AlysJ BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by Phrase. Do you have a product

What would it look like if your company built a boat? Would your customers know what to expect? Launching your first product is punishingly hard. Getting to the second one often even more so, as everything will change: Distribution, brand, product strategy, organization and psychology. Learn about the challenges of growing your product family and how to overcome them.  Georg Petschnigg, Chief Innovation Officer from WeTransfer, and co-founder of FiftyThree, the company behind the popular Paste and Paper applications, will draws from his extensive experiences building award winning products used by millions around the world. Learn how to set up your team and product strategy for success. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by Logi Ana

You've probably made a bad call at some point in your career, that's ok. Today we'll talk about ways to prevent it moving forward and how to recognize and avoid the many belief, behavioral, and social biases, which flaw much human decision making, in your role as product manager. Confirmation bias, authority bias, reputation risk, survival bias and sunk-cost fallacy are rife in organizational decision making and during customer and product validation. Today we will include examples and practical tips you can use right away. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by Logi Analytics, which is offering 5 free reports – from analysts like Gartner and Dresner – to help you navigate the BI landscape. Visit logianalytics.com/rocketship to claim

Often times, finding true product-market-fit can be the most difficult part of the process in launching a new product. In this talk, Rahul shares his predictable and repeatable process for finding and optimizing product-market-fit for SaaS products. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by Logi Analytics, which is offering 5 free reports – from analysts like Gartner and Dresner – to help you navigate the BI landscape. Visit logianalytics.com/rocketship to claim your free reports today. This episode is brought to you by Cloudways. Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting platform that simplifies the hosting experience, Visit Cloudways.com and use the promo code RSCW to get 30% off for 3 months on Cloudways managed cloud hosting platform. Th

Positioning can make or break a new product, yet it rarely gets the attention it deserves. On todays episode, April Dunford the CEO at Ambient Strategy, outlines a product positioning process that will shine a spotlight on your product’s best features. We will also give re-positioning examples and show the impact on the overall business that resulted from that shift in context. You can check out April's book, Obviously Awesome, to dive deeper. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship. This episode is brought to you by Cloudways. Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting platform that simplifies the hos

Marketing automation platform, Sendlane, hit a plateau in both revenue and ideas until they tried using user-centered design to unlock growth. The solution was a surprising effective one that helped to set their roadmap moving forward. Today we talk with Eric Weiss about his experience implementing user-centered design in practice and how it changed the trajectory of the business. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship. This episode is brought to you by Cloudways. Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting platform that simplifies the hosting experience, Visit Cloudways.com and use the promo code RSCW

Catherine Ulrich, a Managing Director of FirstMark Capital, invests in a broad range of enterprise and consumer start-ups. She has a deep passion for and expertise in health and wellness, AI, and behavior change. Prior to joining FirstMark, she was the Chief Product Officer at Shutterstock (NYSE: SSTK) where she was responsible for product strategy and execution across all of Shutterstock’s offerings and brands including the company’s move into machine learning/computer vision and creative editing tools. She was also the first Chief Product Officer at Weight Watchers (NYSE: WTW), responsible for their global digital and retail experiences. Today we talk with Catherine about the six (or seven) types of Product Managers, advantages and disadvantages each face and which products they fit best leading. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free versio

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, comes in many forms. There’s the classic blog post optimization where one would write a piece of content and try to get the right combination of usefulness, keywords, and length to see if Google will rank it high enough to get discovered. but that’s not what Tommy Griffith was doing at Airbnb when he led their SEO team from 2013 - 2017. Today, we take you behind the scenes of the SEO team at Airbnb. How did they approach such a massive problem? What worked? What didn't? That and more on today's episode. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by Logi Analytics, which is offering 5 free reports – from analysts like Gartner and Dresner – to help you navigate the BI landscape. Visit logianalytics.com/rock

Over the past 6 years we've had some amazing conversations with product people and entrepreneurs. Today we're going to bring you some of our favorite bits of product knowledge to help you with everything from diversity, recruiting, tough product decisions, understanding business goals and more. You'll hear from some of our favorite guests like former Facebook PM Alison Go, Jobs to be Done architect Bob Moesta, VP of Product & Strategy at Box Jeetu Patel and even Adii Pienaar. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship. This episode is brought to you by Cloudways. Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting