Episode 756 | Why Great Product Management Is Critical for Your Startup

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Management, Entrepreneurship, Business, Marketing

4.8 • 792 Ratings

🗓️ 11 February 2025

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In episode 756, Rob Walling interviews Brendan Fortune, Director of Product Management at Customer.io, to explore the skills and frameworks for effective product management. Brendan shares his journey and discusses the importance of understanding customer behavior to drive product decisions. They delve into the concept of the flywheel and how it can be leveraged to enhance user success and optimize pricing strategies. Topics we cover: (2:46) – What does a product manager do? (10:36) – When should a SaaS company designate a full time product manager? (15:33) – Pricing and and creating a flywheel (22:41) – Deciding on your “fair” value metric (30:01) – Pricing experimentation in the early days Links from the Show: Applications for TinySeed Spring 2025 are Open! Invest in TinySeed Ask a product question on Startups For the Rest of Us Brendan Fortune | LinkedIn Customer.io Product Flywheel + Pricing + Org Strategy (Miro) Your Pricing is WRONG (even Sam Altman Made This Mistake) If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you! Subscribe & Review: iTunes | Spotify

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to startups for the rest of us. I'm your host, Rob Walling, and today I have the pleasure
0:04.7	of talking with a good friend of mine, Brendan Fortune, about how to be a great product manager.
0:10.5	And you might be thinking to yourself, well, I'm a founder. I don't want to be a cog and a wheel at some
0:15.9	large organization. Product manager, that sounds like a title of someone managing things. That doesn't matter. You know what?
0:22.8	Being a product manager is about making decisions of what to build, how to build it, how to market
0:29.5	those, how to frame them, how to explain them to the rest of your team, and how to explain it
0:35.9	to the world at large in a way that gets people interested.
0:38.7	Product management is a skill that any SaaS founder needs to be aware of, and I think
0:45.1	all of us can improve on that.
0:47.6	Brendan Fortune was the first person aside from the two founders of Drip to make any product decisions about what went into Drip,
0:57.5	what was built and how it was built.
0:59.5	Brendan has been a product manager at several companies.
1:02.9	You'll hear us kind of talk about it in his intro, but we have a great conversation,
1:06.7	not only defining product management.
1:09.7	And you can hear me at the beginning kind of prod him like,
1:12.2	what is product management and how should someone think about that if they're a founder?
1:15.1	But then we get into a framework that Brendan introduced me to
1:20.5	that involves building a flywheel and helping that decide how to make your users more successful
1:26.5	and how to make your product more successful and how to make your product more
1:28.8	successful. If you listen to this episode and you decide you have product questions, things about
1:34.7	how do I decide what to build, how would I think about being a product manager, how can I hire
1:38.1	a product manager, how can it become a product manager, anything around product, product
	...

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