Prospective customers are becoming product users much earlier in the customer journey. As a result, teams and tools are overlapping more than ever. — Nowhere is this change more dramatic than in SaaS companies, where most of the customer experience used to take place outside of the product: Yet today, more of the customer journey takes place inside the product:

Product design today lets builders go faster and further than ever—how did this happen and what comes next? — It’s been almost ten years since Marc Andreessen said, “Software is eating the world.” At the time, coding was indispensable The cost of hosting and scaling a product had plummeted (thanks to cloud hosting and related services), so having your own servers was no longer necessary. …

Good product design — based on user research — ensures you build the right product — TL;DR: Use product design to inform what you are building or risk a slow horrible startup death. Specifically, get the user research right at the outset (frameworks included). Founders/builders/future-self: this is a starting point for building a product. Product designers: if working with a founder who doesn’t understand the value…

Brands have a huge need for local-digital marketing, yet still face surprisingly big challenges — In a recent Techcrunch article about Waze’s acquisition, one of the topics was “The big potential of local advertising,” which touched on Waze’s location-based ad platform. Two big points in that section: 1. Many of the big tech companies have been looking to make a splash in local, whether it’s…