Year 5 as RevenueCat Head of Product – Takeaways and lessons learned
I am now in my fifth year as Head of Product at RevenueCat, and like in the last years, I wanted to share a few things I learned and took away from this year…
Jens-Fabian Goetzmann
Thoughts on Product Management and Leadership
Latest posts
Inside the product management org at RevenueCat – A peek under the hood of our PM org (we’re hiring!)
RevenueCat’s mission is to help developers make more money. Our CEO, Jacob, reminds us in every biweekly all-hands meeting that we do this by “building a winning team” and “shipping and selling stuff that helps developers make more money”. The latter…
Customer Obsession – One of our values at RevenueCat, and key for every PM
Customer obsession is one of our values at RevenueCat, and should be at the heart of any product manager's job not just at RevenueCat but everywhere. In this article, I want to share a few thoughts on what exactly it means to be customer obsessed…
Year 4 as RevenueCat Head of Product – Takeaways and lessons learned
I entered my fourth year as RevenueCat Head of Product in 2024, and in keeping with the tradition from the last couple of years (1, 2), I wanted to share some reflections on this year…
Metrics & Analytics: Crucial Product Management Skill 10/20 – How to measure the success of your product
This post is part of a series of short articles about the 20 most crucial product management skills…
Customer Discovery: Crucial Product Management Skill 9/20 – Getting better at understanding your customer and their needs
This post is part of a series of short articles about the 20 most crucial product management skills…
Product & UX: Crucial Product Management Skill 8/20 – How to develop product and UX sense
This post is part of a series of short articles about the 20 most crucial product management skills…
My Personal Approach to Balance – My changing thoughts on work/life balance
Recently, there has been another surge of discussions around the “right” approach to work/life balance in tech companies. Personally, I think these discussions are moot: I don’t think there is one right approach for how to achieve work/life balance.…
PM Hiring Practices – Recent changes to my hiring process
I've written in the past about hiring the team as a product leader. In this short article, I want to share some practices I've recently adopted and liked in my hiring processes…
Business: Crucial Product Management Skill 7/20 – Understand and represent business considerations in product decisions
This post is part of a series of short articles about the 20 most crucial product management skills. I started this series in 2021, and then it... fell asleep. This is the first new article after a two-year hiatus of the series…
The End of Software? – Musings on today’s take
This article was making the rounds on Twitter today…
Year 3 as RevenueCat Head of Product – Takeaways and lessons learned
I joined RevenueCat as Head of Product mid-2021, so 2023 was my third year in the job. The story so far was as follows…
Managing Up as a Product Manager – How to manage your manager
Managing up is one of the most underrated skills as a product manager. Product managers spend a lot of time managing laterally: designers, engineers, and stakeholders across the organization. Therefore, it can be appealing to treat your manager as…
Getting Things Done as a Product Manager – How to stay on top of your to-do list
In this article, I will share some tips for remaining organized, ensuring nothing slips through the cracks, and prioritizing the most important work…
Product Manager Take Home Assignment Examples – Some product management interview homework assignments I've come across
I have been asked quite a few times for examples for product manager take home assignment / homework assignment questions, so I decided to put together a list of some that I have given candidates or been given as a candidate. Some of these have been…
Why You Should Send a Weekly Summary Email – A deceptively simple productivity and management tool
Since I joined RevenueCat a year and a half ago, I have without fail sent a weekly email summary to my manager and my team, and I am asking all product managers in my team to do the same. It's not something I invented, and it's deceptively simple.…
My Product Leadership Reflections on 2022 – Some things I learned last year
It's been a while since I wrote a year-in-review post – five years, after my first full year as a product manager at Yammer. 2022 was not my first full year as Head of Product, but it was momentous for me in my role at RevenueCat. I went from…
I Interviewed ChatGPT for a PM role, and it almost got the job – How to detect the AI's confident but shallow answers
I've interviewed a lot of product manager candidates, and one of the regular interview formats (which is pretty standard in a PM interview loop) is the product sense interview. Inspired by the recent launch of ChatGPT and the following tweet by…
Managing Work in Progress as a Product Manager – Speed up by increasing focus
Product managers are continuously inundated with requests and ideas from all sides. Even when being very careful with prioritization, it can happen that the team ends up with too many projects being worked on in parallel – a large amount of work in…
Remote and Asynchronous Product Management – How to thrive as a PM when working from anywhere
I am currently Head of Product at RevenueCat. Our team of roughly 60 people is globally distributed, fully remote and async-first. This is my first fully remote position, and in this article, I want to share a few lessons I have learned to be…
Reducing Bias as a Product Manager – Thinking, Fast and Slow
Human brains are pretty amazing. We take in millions of pieces of information every second, process them, make connections with what we already know, and make decisions based on that. The way we manage that is by taking lots of shortcuts—we could not…
Why product managers should not be data driven – Don’t get hit by Goodhart’s Law
Before the advent of SaaS and ubiquitous internet access, software companies had very little information about how end users actually used their products. They had to painstakingly conduct research trying to understand their customers’ behavior, and…
Interviewing Product Managers for Product Sense – Evaluating “hard” product skills
I’ve been involved in interview panels for a lot of PMs, and have set up hiring processes for product managers in two different startups. One of the critical components of the interview loop should be what I call the “Product Sense” interview, in…
Take-home assignments for product management candidates – The pros and cons of requiring written homework
I've recently gone through the process of designing a product management interview process for RevenueCat. This is not the first interview process I've set up from scratch, but one of the questions that comes up every single time is whether a written…
Defining teams for a product development organization – Four interesting ideas about product org design
Recently I've been again thinking a lot about setting up product development teams, since we are working on growing the product and engineering orgs at RevenueCat…
Technology: Crucial Product Management Skill 6/20 – Don't attempt to be an engineer, but work with them effectively
This post is part of a series of short articles about the 20 most crucial product management skills…
Take-home assignments are not free work – Don't worry, companies won't just steal your responses
Many companies require candidates for product-related positions, such as product managers, product designers, UX researchers, analysts, content strategists, or data scientists to complete a written take-home assignment…
What science fiction taught me about product management – And here I was thinking I was reading for fun
When I am not working in product management or reading, thinking, and writing about it, I read quite a bit of speculative fiction, mostly science fiction. As I was reflecting on what makes a good science fiction story, I realized that some of the…
Customer & Industry: Crucial Product Management Skill 5/20 – Knowing your customer and industry, inside out
This post is part of a series of short articles about the 20 most crucial product management skills…
High Agency: Crucial Product Management Skill 4/20 – If at first you don't succeed, ...
This post is part of a series of short articles about the 20 most crucial product management skills…
The Crucial Ingredient For Better Meetings – Five minutes of meeting preparation to save countless hours
Before my product management career, I spent five years working in strategy consulting. There are many things you can say about strategy consulting—some good, and some not so good. Without assessing the net benefits of having worked in consulting for…
Ownership: Crucial Product Management Skill 3/20 – Think like an owner, act like an owner
This post is part of a series of short articles about the 20 most crucial product management skills…
Empathy: Crucial Product Management Skill 2/20 – A product manager's superpower
This post is part of a series of short articles about the 20 most crucial product management skills…
Communication: Crucial Product Management Skill 1/20 – Why communication is the most foundational product management skill
This post is part of a series of short articles about the 20 most crucial product management skills…
Twenty Crucial Product Management Skills – Where great product managers excel—a comprehensive list
As a product leader, I believe that helping your team grow and develop is one of my most critical responsibilities. The first step to growing as a product manager is understanding the skills that are required and what “great” looks like for each of…
What is a Product Vision? – Often mentioned, rarely understood
One of the trickiest concepts to grasp in product development is that of a product vision. I have written about the topic before. My conclusions in that article was that a product vision should describe the customer benefits and the world you are…
Product management strength and form – Mastering the two different types of product development work
One interesting and underreported aspect of product development and product management is that there are two fundamentally different types of product work. Both are required to build a successful product, and the best product teams and product…
Seven Great Books for Product Managers – Deepen your product management skills with these fantastic reads
After my previous post on great reads for aspiring product managers, here is a list for people already in the product management job who are looking to deepen their skills. In this article, I am focusing exclusively on books that allow a deeper dive…
PM 101: Working with Engineers – How to collaborate effectively with technical team members
In the “PM 101” series I am sharing some PM basics that I wish I had known when I first started as a product manager. In this article, I share a few best practices to better collaborate with engineers…
Product Management is Risk Management – It sounds strange, but only at first glance
Product management is a broad and varied discipline. Among the less obvious aspects of that discipline is the fact that product management is, at its heart, risk management…
A Reading List for Aspiring Product Managers – Looking to break into product management? Here are some pointers
Over the years, I've given advice to quite a few people who were interested in breaking into product management. Amongst other things, I've always left them with a list of books and articles to read—there is a lot of great content that can shed more…
Do Product Managers Need to Be Technical? – “It depends”, of course, but here's what it depends on
Many product management job descriptions list an engineering or computer science degree as a prerequisite. While technical skills and experience can certainly be an asset for product managers, it is an interesting question how much of it is needed…
How Do You Prioritize What To Build? – You don't need a product prioritization framework, but a pyramid
Prioritization is one of the top challenges product managers are facing. Every product team has vastly more ideas than time to build them, necessitating prioritization. What makes this challenge even harder than the scarcity of resources is the…
Seven Product Management Principles – How to improve your product management and leadership practices
Product management is a relatively new discipline that keeps evolving rapidly. Every week, there are new articles about product development best practices that industry leaders are following. This deluge of information can make it difficult to…
25 Product Management Lessons – Some things I've learned along the way
I've been in product management and product leadership roles for half a decade now, and I've picked up a thing or two along the way. In this post, I am sharing 25 bite-sized lessons that I have learned over time—I hope they can help make you a better…
One exercise to improve at product job interviews – Building your product muscle, one hour at a time
I usually don't write much about breaking into product management—I believe that there are others who have more valuable insights to share than I do, and I therefore focus my writing on what I have learned while working as a product manager and…
Looking for Best Practices? Try Best Principles. – Why implementing hyped frameworks won't get you far
The product development world is enamored with best practices and frameworks. Hardly a week goes by in which there isn't another set of processes and practices being discussed and at times even hyped: from the Spotify model to Basecamp's Shape Up,…
The Case for Empowered Product Teams – Why you should let your teams figure out what to build
One of the central best practices of modern product development is the empowered product team. An empowered team is a cross-functional team, composed of product, design, and engineering, that is tasked with solving specific customer problems in ways…
You are not Focusing Enough – Delivering as many good ideas as possible doesn't create great products
In many product organizations, quarterly goal setting exercises and roadmaps discussions amount to a negotiation between product leadership and/or product management and the rest of the team, how many features can get built in a given time frame. The…
The Discomfort of a Great Product Team – Why teams without conflicts don't tend to produce great products
One of the most counterintuitive aspects about great product teams is that being a part of them isn't always comfortable. It's not all smooth sailing: there are frictions and disagreements between team members, differences in working styles, and…