Replatforming Old Ideas
AI isn’t a new way to deliver software – it’s a new way to make products massively more productive.
Niklas Stephenson
Thoughts on product leadership, entrepreneurship, and building software. A founder's journey in the SaaS world.
Latest posts
Make one customer happy
Find one customer that is funny and motivating to work with, and learn about all their problems, select one and solve it. Simple.
Red ocean
Why bootstrapped founders should embrace crowded “red ocean” markets instead of chasing “blue ocean” ideas - because customers are already buying, competitors get complacent, and there’s always room for a smarter new player.
A great zero and direction
Every idea for a company needs two potentials: a starting product and a direction that can last a decade.
Product vision should never be the company vision
Multiple times in my roles as a product leader and in my coaching of other leaders, I have met the expectations of The Product Vision, the one document that should be the north star of our company, the document that we expect to show us a path towards a future so great that we have not been able to deliver it yet.
Break process
When writing about product leadership, it’s easy to write about the process—the stuff that is easy to visualise and express. But the truth is that we only have processes to facilitate the lowest denominator of creativity in a team. We would have no processes if we had better ways to innovate as a team.
Seasons in life
I am often asked about when I am going to start a startup again and why the hell I am working for someone else instead of myself, and I know that a lot of former founders are getting asked the same when applying for jobs, heck even getting rejected due to worries about how long they are going to stay in the role. "What is your commitment? Are you not just going to leave us in a few months to go…
Thoughts on a four-day workweek
For the last year, I have worked at AutoUncle, which runs four-day workweeks, and I wanted to share my reflections a year in.
Reflection on Founder Mode from a former founder, now hired manager
I had to read the post three times before I went from feeling pissed on by Paul Grahams’s lovely directness to reflecting on my journey from founder to manager (VP Product and Engineering), how my management style has been influenced by Manager Mode and how many founders I have seen struggle with the wasteland between Founder and Manager mode.
Shaping every day
In Shape Up, a common mistake is to shape only when doing cooldown. “Cooldown is too short; I don’t have time to shape!" is a common complaint when introducing Shape Up into a product organisation.
There should be no Junior Product Managers
Stop hiring junior product managers, you need to hire senior people and help them grow into leadership roles.
Shape Up and OKRs, a great couple or a disaster?
Shape Up is a fantastic framework for expressing opportunities and deciding what bets you want to place. Over the last few years, I have used multiple variants of Shape Up and helped a handful of companies implement the parts of Shape Up that fit their organisation.
Empowered Shape Up
Shape Up is an awesome, practical, and pragmatic introduction to the process surrounding product management. It offers great tools to describe and prioritize what to build and when. However, it also describes power dynamics that will slow you down and potentially kill your team’s motivation. It will also lead you to build the wrong features as you scale.
Duel-track Shape Up
Lately, I have talked to a lot of people about the shaping process of Shape Up. A common misunderstanding most have is that writing pitches are something you do in the last days leading up to the betting table, nothing could be more wrong.
Fear of the truth
When you start a company, it quickly becomes a big part of your identity. For many years, I was "Niklas from Firmafon". I had friends I met through the startup journey that only knew me due to my company.
Shiny new object syndrome
Yesterday I talked to a candidate who was considering applying for a developer role at Legal Monster , he could not understand why we did not apply ML/AI to solve problems.
Thoughts on code
What should code be?
Stop taking advice and do the job yourself
It's a little bit ironic to write a blog post with advice that asks you to stop taking advice, but here we go.
Related posts, as a network
One of the awesome things about Medium is that you get a blogging platform with a build in audience, you don't need to build your own from the ground up. It's hard work building an audience on your blog, I am doing it right now, and it takes a long time and requires a lot of grid.
Slacking on Slack
Slack seems to be the tool all companies need if they want to be a real tech company. Email is dead, and real-time group chat is required to be cool.
The missing link in SaaS
One thing I liked about the good old days of desktop software was that applications always created a physical file on my local desktop. That file I could copy, share and open with other application as I wished.
Poof and your product is gone
Last week I talked with a startup that had struck a deal with a tech company, for a percentage of the startup the tech company would build their product.
Choosing Ruby on Rails is not a technical decision
You should just go with Rails.
The trench
It's now a few months since I left Trustpilot to start a new company together with my great friend Søren. It's 8 years since I last spent time only focused on such an early adventure.
How to relax your mind
Through my many years as an entrepreneur, one of the hardest things to deal with is the constant flow of thoughts. Your girlfriend were speaking to you, but all you were thinking about was that one support case that were hard to solve. I remember when my mother turned 50, but all I could think about was how I would be able to pay the bills next month.
What great product managers do and don’t do
A while ago, an old friend asked me, “What do great product managers do?” More importantly, he asked, “What don’t they do?” That’s a huge question. In fact, we could talk hours about this…
Should we build what sales asks for?
The other day, one of our product managers at Trustpilot came to me with a question: "Should we build what our sales team is asking for?"
Team quarterly plans
At Trustpilot, we are 550+ people across 7 different offices all over the world. When we set OKR's for a product team it's often hard for the entire organisation to understand why we are focusing on one area and not another.
The roadmap is dead
Long live the roadmap
A successful product team
Its hard to describe our full process at Trustpilot in an easy to read blog post, it would take words enough to write a full book, not because it's complicated, but because it's different.
A product managers reading list
I often talk with startups and product managers from larger companies about how we work, how they work and how we would all love to work. Often in our talks, their dream process and workplace is quite close to how we work at Trustpilot. Our conversations are often short and not really in depth so I leave them with a list of books and blogs to read, my full list is long, but below is a list of four…
Should we invest more in it?
As basic as it gets
Why I hate app agencies
I often mentor early-stage start-ups on how to validate, test and pitch their ideas. I talk to almost everybody who contacts me even if I think their ideas sound like bullshit. I don’t know what really works and what doesn't, but I help the founders (often pre-start-up) with ways to validate their ideas without them having to build any real products.
Leading Product Managers
Throughout my career I have always been involved with product management in one way or another. I also have had various roles in leadership, but in my current role as VP of Growth at Trustpilot it’s my first time combining the two, leading product managers.
Frame your problem or idea with an Opportunity Canvas
When you as a product manager is working on a business problem there are so many factors to consider that it some times can be hard to get a holistic view of what the problem is, what solutions are out there and how its going to impact your business.
Learning from user interviews
We do a lot of user interviews at Trustpilot. Our consumer-facing team speaks to users that write, read and share reviews on Trustpilot.com, and our business-facing teams talk with companies that use Trustpilot. From January–May 2017 alone we’ve interviewed 102 participants.
How do we test it faster
We need to test faster then lightning speed.