10 Most Popular Product Management Posts - ProductFTW #100
ProductFTW has officially made it to 100.
Before we get into #100, a quick programming note: ProductFTW is taking the next two weeks off. After 100 issues, it feels like a good time for a short break. We’ll be back with ProductFTW #101 in a couple of weeks.
Now, back to #100.
Over the last 100 issues, we’ve written about product requirements, user research, technical leadership, career growth, bugs, edge cases, fintech, and a lot of the messy parts of building products that don’t always make it into the product management books.
For our 100th issue, we’re looking back at the ProductFTW posts you’ve read the most.
Some of these go all the way back to the beginning. Others are relatively new. Together, they’re a pretty good representation of what ProductFTW has become.
Here are the 10 most popular ProductFTW posts.
1. The Tire Swing Cartoon - ProductFTW #2
We’re going all the way back to issue #2 for the most popular ProductFTW post.
The tire swing cartoon has been around forever, but I still think it’s one of the best illustrations of what can go wrong when building a product. A customer asks for one thing, everyone involved interprets it differently, and somehow we end up building something else entirely.
The lesson is still relevant: understanding what someone actually needs is much harder than it sounds.
2. The Unhappy Path - ProductFTW #58
Product teams spend a lot of time thinking about the happy path. The user signs up. The payment works. The API responds. Everything behaves exactly as expected.
Real users have other plans.
The unhappy path is what happens when something goes wrong, and those experiences deserve just as much product attention as the ones where everything works perfectly.
3. The Product Management Career Path - ProductFTW #84
Product management has a weird career path. At a lot of companies, moving up eventually means becoming responsible for people instead of products. The problem is that managing people and being an excellent product manager are two very different skill sets.
This post looks at what progression in product management can look like and why management shouldn’t be the only path available to great product people.
Read The Product Management Career Path
4. Bug Handling - ProductFTW #36
Every product has bugs. What matters is what happens after you find them.
Which bugs get fixed immediately? Which ones can wait? Who decides how important they are? How do you weigh a frustrating customer experience against everything else sitting in the backlog?
Bug handling sounds like an engineering process, but there are a surprising number of product decisions hiding inside it.
5. Decision Fatigue - ProductFTW #42
Product managers make a ridiculous number of decisions.
Some are obviously important. Others feel tiny until six months later when someone asks why the product works a certain way, and you realize that tiny decision became permanent.
This post is about decision fatigue, how it affects product managers, and why we need to be more deliberate about where we spend our decision-making energy.
6. The Balance Between Product and Technical Leadership - ProductFTW #52
The relationship between product and engineering can make or break a product team.
The best partnerships I’ve seen have clear ownership without building a wall between product and technical leadership. Both sides should challenge each other, bring different expertise to the problem, and understand where each person should lead.
Read The Balance Between Product and Technical Leadership
7. Why Credit Card Payment Options Confuse Users - ProductFTW #67
Minimum payment. Statement balance. Current balance. Other amount.
If you work in financial services, those terms probably feel obvious. If you’re a normal person trying to pay your credit card bill, maybe not.
This is one of my favorite fintech examples of something that makes complete sense to the people who built it and considerably less sense to the person trying to use it.
Read Why Credit Card Payment Options Confuse Users
8. Product Requirements Document (PRD) Template - ProductFTW #86
I have a lot of opinions about PRDs.
After writing about whether PRDs are still relevant, I wanted to create something people could actually use. This post includes my PRD template and explains how I think about documenting requirements without turning the PRD into a giant document nobody wants to read.
Read the Product Requirements Document Template
9. Real Life is Full of Edge Cases - ProductFTW #87
We design products around expected behavior and then hand them to real people who immediately do things we didn’t expect.
Sometimes those situations are truly rare. Sometimes the thing we called an edge case turns out to happen all the time. This post is about designing for the messiness of real life instead of assuming everyone will use our products exactly the way we imagined.
Read Real Life is Full of Edge Cases
10. The Biggest Mistake You Can Make During User Interviews - ProductFTW #81
User interviews are incredibly valuable, but they’re also surprisingly easy to mess up.
One of the biggest mistakes is going into an interview trying to validate what you already believe. At that point, you’re not really doing research. You’re looking for evidence that you’re right.
Good product discovery requires being genuinely willing to hear an answer you don’t want.
Read The Biggest Mistake You Can Make During User Interviews
Here’s to 100
One hundred issues is a lot of product management.
We’ve covered lessons, mistakes, opinions, templates, fintech rabbit holes, and plenty of things we wish someone had told us earlier in our careers. Along the way, ProductFTW has also become a place where we can dig into the messy parts of building products and share what we’re learning as we go.
On a personal note, I’ve loved being part of writing it. Some of my favorite posts have come from something I was working through myself, a conversation with another product person, or a question that sent me spiraling.
Thank you to everyone who reads ProductFTW, shares a post with a coworker, responds with your own experience, tells us when you disagree, or gives us another product problem to obsess over.
See you at #101.
About ProductFTW
ProductFTW is a weekly newsletter about product management, with a focus on real-life experiences in startups. We want to help product leaders be successful by giving realistic approaches that aren’t for giant tech companies. We know you don’t have a full-time product designer on each team. We know your software probably hasn’t been used by millions of people worldwide–yet. We’re here to bridge the content gap from building your product and team to scaling it.