Rocketship.fm

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,...

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 N...

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 co...

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...

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 wee...

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 $...

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 ar...

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 con...

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...

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...

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 $4...

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...

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...

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 testi...

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...

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 u...

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 deo...

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 Inno...

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 deci...

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 sho...

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 A...

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 o...

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 offeri...

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...

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 architec...