Square was founded to solve the pain point of a well known glass blower in San Francisco who lost a sale because he couldn't accept a credit card transaction. The prototype was built in a month, and Jack raised $600 just by charging VC's to hear his pitch. Today we walk you through the Product Journey that is Square with their Hardware Lead, Jesse Dorogusker, who left Apple to join the team in 2011. Want an ad free experience? Subscribe today at glow.fm/rocketship and get a private feed you list...
Apr 23, 2020•28 min•Season 9Ep. 1
The stock was tanking, and the company kept hemorrhaging cash. Investors sued. Some users even filed a suit. It was a losing battle from the start but what really went wrong at the beloved startup MoviePass. Today we tell the story of MoviePass's rise and ultimate fall on the season finale of Rocketship.fm's Product Failures. 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 n...
Apr 16, 2020•31 min•Season 8Ep. 13
Today we discuss another type of failure that is all too common, especially in young companies - team failure. We talk with Latif Nanji, the founder and CEO of Roadmonk, about his first startup Pokerspace.com and the many mistakes they made trying to move in the same direction as a team, but often failing miserably. 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 ne...
Apr 09, 2020•34 min•Season 8Ep. 12
The Exit. Liquidity. Acquihire. Merger. No matter the name, it’s a milestone in any entrepreneurs life. Today we take a look at the real stories behind acquisitions, when the outcome isn’t quite what you read about in Techcrunch with stories from Andy Sparks, former COO of Mattermark, Courtland Alves VP of Product & Mentorship at Bloc and Morris Wheeler, DrummondRoad Capital founder and principal. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month...
Apr 02, 2020•25 min•Season 8Ep. 11
Path was created in 2010 by former Facebook employee Dave Morin as a sort of anti-Facebook. It stood out with one good idea: limits for friends. You couldn’t add more than 50 people to your network when it first launched. As Facebook ballooned in size and our friend lists grew with it, Path sought to be the place where you chatted with only the people you were closest to. And for a little while, the idea seemed to work. Quickly, Google reportedly tried to gobble it up. By mid-2013, Morin proclai...
Mar 26, 2020•31 min•Season 8Ep. 10
In 2000, Reed Hastings, the founder of a fledgling company called Netflix, flew to Dallas to propose a partnership to Blockbuster CEO John Antioco and his team. The idea was that Netflix would run Blockbuster’s brand online and Antioco’s firm would promote Netflix in its stores. Hastings got laughed out of the room. Blockbuster went bankrupt in 2010 and Netflix is now a $28 billion dollar company, about ten times what Blockbuster was worth. So what happened that led Blockbuster's demise? We expl...
Mar 19, 2020•31 min•Season 8Ep. 9
From creating unsafe driving conditions to aggravating spouses across the globe, todays failure is a lesson in what happens when your team lacks diversity, especially of lived experiences that help build empathy for your customers. Today, we take you behind the scenes of Audibles iOS7 redesign that overhauled the design of the app, but forgot to take several key use-cases into consideration. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 an...
Mar 12, 2020•17 min•Season 8Ep. 8
On September 11, 2001 two American Airlines airplanes were hijacked. One was flown into the north tower of the World Trade Center and the other crashed into a field on it's way to the White House killing everyone onboard. As people scrambled to find out what happened to their loved ones, the American Airlines automated phone systems failed as they refused to included what is known as the Mayday codes. Today we talk with Blade Kotelly, who built the automated phone system for several Airlines, in...
Mar 05, 2020•20 min•Season 8Ep. 7
We've been talking a lot about well known product failures, but at this point in the series, we're going to take a little pause. Today, we remember that there are very real people behind these failures. These people have feelings and the failures they’ve experienced, they’ve probably affected them in different ways. Today we sit down with Jerry Colonna. Jerry is an American venture capitalist and professional coach who played a prominent part in the early development of Silicon Valley. He is kno...
Feb 27, 2020•26 min•Season 8Ep. 6
Raising $41 million dollars before launch, Color should have been an instant hit, but instead met a swift demise. When it launched, the application had around 1 million downloads. By September 2011, the service had a little under 100,000 active users. Founded by serial entrepreneur Bill Nguyen and successful operator, Peter Pham, Color had one of the best teams in the business. However, in the weeks following Color's initial launch, controversy surrounded the startup's $41 million funding and mi...
Feb 20, 2020•22 min•Season 8Ep. 5
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 ...
Feb 13, 2020•25 min•Season 8Ep. 4
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 h...
Feb 06, 2020•20 min•Season 8Ep. 3
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 steppin...
Jan 30, 2020•23 min•Season 8Ep. 2
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 laun...
Jan 23, 2020•23 min•Season 8Ep. 1
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 seaso...
Jan 16, 2020•31 min•Season 8Ep. 1
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 a...
Jan 09, 2020•33 min
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 exclusi...
Jan 02, 2020•25 min
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 Pr...
Dec 26, 2019•23 min
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 l...
Dec 19, 2019•21 min
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 man...
Dec 12, 2019•18 min
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 Rocketsh...
Dec 05, 2019•27 min
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 ...
Nov 28, 2019•28 min
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 an...
Nov 21, 2019•29 min
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...
Nov 14, 2019•32 min
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. C...
Nov 07, 2019•33 min
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 P...
Oct 31, 2019•29 min
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...
Oct 24, 2019•24 min
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 editi...
Oct 17, 2019•27 min
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? Wh...
Oct 10, 2019•22 min
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 ...
Oct 03, 2019•27 min
