Maker Log - “Product Show & Tell” Lean Experiment

I’ve been thinking about a new side project I can work on but want to ensure that I don’t spend a lot of time building something that people wont use. It’s so easy to fall into that trap on my side projects even though it’s completely opposite of how I like to build products as a Product Manager during my day job. Maybe this is due to a side project being just that, something that you work on for fun on the side. Since it’s just for fun, it’s easy to take shortcuts on lean product development best practices and just jump into building. Despite it being a fun project, I would like it to be useful so I’m performing a lean experiment to validate the opportunity.

The Opportunity

I love reading Product Management articles but I always have to go to a variety of places to find good content. Some of my favorite places are MindtheProduct, ProductTalk, and the Intercom blog. Feedly helps to aggregate my favorite sites but I would like a standalone solution dedicated to Product Management articles so that I don’t get pulled into the rabbit-hole of the other topics I follow. In addition, I would like for others to be able to contribute content since my feed only contains sites that I’m familiar with. It would be cool to create a community around the best product management content from all around the web rather than just the best content I’m aware of. With that in mind, the opportunity that I believe exists is to create a place that aggregates the best product management content from product managers around the globe.

The Lean Experiment

The lean experiment I’m performing is to create a list of Product Management resources using https://lystof.com, a site that allows you to easily drop articles into a list, collect subscribers, and allow others to contribute to the list. The nice thing about using Lystof is I won’t have to build anything for the experiment and I can test two key assumptions: 

1) People are interested in seeing quality Product Management articles from around the web in one place

I will consider this validated if in 2 weeks I have 20+ subscribers to the list with minimal, free marketing effort which will include sharing on a few PM slack channels, Twitter, Reddit, and IndieHackers.

2) People are willing to contribute Product Management articles.

I will consider this validated if in 2 weeks I receive content submissions from 10 different people. There’s a risk here that people are willing to initially submit content but not continue to submit content over time but that seems less risky than these two assumptions that must be true for this idea to be successful. I can perform another experiment in the future to validate that people are willing to continuously submit content. 

Kick-Off

Now that you have some background about the lean experiment I’m conducting which I’m calling Product Show & Tell, feel free to follow along. The Product Show & Tell list was created here on 10/17: https://lystof.com/list/H1uJV9Utr/product-show-and-tell

So far, the list has been shared on the Product School and Women in Product slack channels along with IndieHacker.com and Twitter.

I’ll share an update in a week with a mid-point update on how the experiment is going.

Alright yall,

Peace