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Product Failures: Google+ Feb 13, 2020

Show notes

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?

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This episode is brought to you by:

Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship.

Product Institute is an online course for new and tenured product managers. Head to productinstitute.com and enter the code ROCKET at checkout, you'll receive $200 off your subscription.

Augusto Digita l. Augusto Digital is a product engineering team that creates web, mobile, and cloud based digital products. Rocketship listeners get $1,000 off by going to augusto.digital/rocketship.

Rocketship is brought to you by The Podglomerate.

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This show is a part of the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. We encourage you to visit the website and sign up for our newsletter for more information about our shows, launches, and events. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy.

Since you're listening to Rocketship, we'd like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows surrounding entrepreneurship, business, and careers like Creative Elements and Freelance to Founder.

Product Failures: eBay Feb 06, 2020

Show notes

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 he lead the "findings" team internally.

BIG NEWS

This episode is brought to you by:

Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship.

Product Institute is an online course for new and tenured product managers. Head to productinstitute.com and enter the code ROCKET at checkout, you'll receive $200 off your subscription.

Augusto Digita l. Augusto Digital is a product engineering team that creates web, mobile, and cloud based digital products. Rocketship listeners get $1,000 off by going to augusto.digital/rocketship.

Rocketship is brought to you by The Podglomerate.

***

Since you're listening to Rocketship, we'd like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows surrounding entrepreneurship, business, and careers like Creative Elements and Freelance to Founder.

Product Failures: TurboTax Jan 30, 2020

Show notes

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 stepping stone in between these two business lines. The company’s leadership had decided it was an appropriate time for a major roll-out of the product and the purpose of the November meeting was to discuss and decide upon a go-to-market plan for PersonalPro.

But not all launches create hockey stick growth. Find out what happened behind the scenes when Intuit rolled out TurboTax PersonalPro the led to its initial failure.

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This episode is brought to you by:

DigitalOcean, the cloud platform that makes it easy for startups to launch high-performance modern apps and websites. Learn more about DigitalOcean and apply for Hatch at do.co/rocketship.

App & Flow. If you're a startup founder, App & Flow will help you build an app that's ready for takeoff. Rocketship listeners get 25% off of their first month by going to rocketshipfm.appandflow.com.

Augusto Digita l. Augusto Digital is a product engineering team that creates web, mobile, and cloud based digital products. Rocketship listeners get $1,000 off by going to augusto.digital/rocketship.

Logi Analytics is the leading platform for embedded analytics. Take your dashboard and reports to the next level. Rocketship listeners get free access to the Logi Analytics library of product demos by going to logianalytics.com/rocketship.

Rocketship is brought to you by The Podglomerate.

***

Since you're listening to Rocketship, we'd like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows surrounding entrepreneurship, business, and careers like Creative Elements and Freelance to Founder.

Product Failures: Webvan Jan 23, 2020

Show notes

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

This episode is brought to you by:

DigitalOcean, the cloud platform that makes it easy for startups to launch high-performance modern apps and websites. Learn more about DigitalOcean and apply for Hatch at do.co/rocketship.

App & Flow. If you're a startup founder, App & Flow will help you build an app that's ready for takeoff. Rocketship listeners get 25% off of their first month by going to rocketshipfm.appandflow.com.

Augusto Digita l. Augusto Digital is a product engineering team that creates web, mobile, and cloud based digital products. Rocketship listeners get $1,000 off by going to augusto.digital/rocketship.

Rocketship is brought to you by The Podglomerate.

***

Since you're listening to Rocketship, we'd like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows surrounding entrepreneurship, business, and careers like Creative Elements and Freelance to Founder.

Product Failures: Skeletons in Our Closet Jan 16, 2020

Show notes

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

This episode is brought to you by:

Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship.

DigitalOcean, the cloud platform that makes it easy for startups to launch high-performance modern apps and websites. Learn more about DigitalOcean and apply for Hatch at do.co/rocketship.

App & Flow. If you're a startup founder, App & Flow will help you build an app that's ready for takeoff. Rocketship listeners get 25% off of their first month by going to rocketshipfm.appandflow.com.

Augusto Digital. Augusto Digital is a product engineering team that creates web, mobile, and cloud based digital products. Rocketship listeners get $1,000 off by going to augusto.digital/rocketship.

Rocketship is brought to you by The Podglomerate.

***

Since you're listening to Rocketship, we'd like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows surrounding entrepreneurship, business, and careers like Creative Elements and Freelance to Founder.

400 Episodes 😱 Jan 09, 2020

Show notes

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.

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Listen to the full episodes:

Relationships

http://rocketship.fm/episodes/chapter_7_relationships/

Twitter Confessionals

http://rocketship.fm/episodes/twitter_confessionals/

The Evolution of the Baseball Cap

http://rocketship.fm/episodes/the_evolution_of_the_baseball_cap_product_ep_1/

The Untold Story Of Books.Com

http://rocketship.fm/episodes/the_untold_story_of_books_com_part_1/

http://rocketship.fm/episodes/the_untold_story_of_books_com_part_2/

Mental Models for Product Managers

http://rocketship.fm/episodes/mental_models_for_product_managers/

Mastering Jobs to be Done

http://rocketship.fm/episodes/mastering_jobs_to_be_done_interviews_the_preparation/

Interview with Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt

http://rocketship.fm/interviews/ryan_hoover_of_product_hunt_on_how_product_hunt_was_launched_in_less_than_1_week/

This episode is brought to you by:

Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship.

DigitalOcean, the cloud platform that makes it easy for startups to launch high-performance modern apps and websites. Learn more about DigitalOcean and apply for Hatch at do.co/rocketship.

App & Flow. If you're a startup founder, App & Flow will help you build an app that's ready for takeoff. Rocketship listeners get 25% off of their first month by going to rocketshipfm.appandflow.com.

Rocketship is brought to you by The Podglomerate.

***

Since you're listening to Rocketship, we'd like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows surrounding entrepreneurship, business, and careers like Creative Elements and Freelance to Founder.

The implications of the surveillance economy Jan 02, 2020

Show notes

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

This episode is brought to you by:

Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship.

DigitalOcean, the cloud platform that makes it easy for startups to launch high-performance modern apps and websites. Learn more about DigitalOcean and apply for Hatch at do.co/rocketship.

App & Flow. If you're a startup founder, App & Flow will help you build an app that's ready for takeoff. Rocketship listeners get 25% off of their first month by going to rocketshipfm.appandflow.com.

Rocketship is brought to you by The Podglomerate.

***

Since you're listening to Rocketship, we'd like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows surrounding entrepreneurship, business, and careers like Creative Elements and Freelance to Founder.

The Incredible Evolution of Big Data Dec 26, 2019

Show notes

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.

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Including interviews with Vas Natarajan of Accel Ventures and Amr Awadallah of Cloudera.

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Since you're listening to Rocketship, we'd like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows surrounding entrepreneurship, business, and careers like Creative Elements and Freelance to Founder.

Stop that A/B Test (and do this instead) Dec 19, 2019

Show notes

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

This episode is brought to you by:

Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship.

Logi Analytics, which is offering 5 free reports – from analysts like Gartner and Dresner – to help you navigate the BI landscape. Visit logianalytics.com/rocketship to claim your free reports today.

DigitalOcean, the cloud platform that makes it easy for startups to launch high-performance modern apps and websites. Learn more about DigitalOcean and apply for Hatch at do.co/rocketship.

App & Flow. If you're a startup founder, App & Flow will help you build an app that's ready for takeoff. Rocketship listeners get 25% off of their first month by going to rocketshipfm.appandflow.com.

Rocketship is brought to you by The Podglomerate.

***

Since you're listening to Rocketship, we'd like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows surrounding entrepreneurship, business, and careers like Creative Elements and Freelance to Founder.

The (Abbreviated) History of Product Management Dec 12, 2019

Show notes

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 manager today. Their responsibilities ranged from tracking sales to managing the product, advertising and promotions. They were to “take full responsibility” for the brands implementation of advertising and sales and take a ‘huge weight’ off of the sales managers who were both ideating and implementing growth strategies.

Bill Hewlett and David Packard interpreted the Brand Man ethos as putting decision making as close as possible to the customer, and making the product manager the voice of the customer internally. In the book The Hewlett-Packard Way this is credited with sustaining Hewlett-Packard’s 50 year record of unbroken 20% year-on-year growth between 1943 and 1993.

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Since you're listening to Rocketship, we'd like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows surrounding entrepreneurship, business, and careers like Creative Elements and Freelance to Founder.

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