Jeremey DuVall — Customer-Focused Product Manager

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about backlogs. They’re equal parts a treasure trove of ideas and the dark corner where ideas are left and often forgotten about.
Everyone has a backlog. Within a single company, each function even has their own list of ideas. Support has a catalogue of customer issues. Marketing has a list of tweaks, messaging updates, and optimizations. Product and Eng obviously have a list of...

I recently tried out HEY, the email and calendar combo from the team over at 37Signals (e.g. Basecamp). I won’t be continuing with the trial because it’s missing several features I need—namely, email specific signatures and write capabilities to Google...

While reading Casey Winters’ post about finding product/market fit, I came across this new-to-me quote from Jeff Bezos pulled from an Amazon shareholder letter (emphasis mine):
One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent. Their expectations are never static – they go up. It’s human nature. We didn’t ascend from our hunter-gatherer days by being satisfied. People have a voracious appetite for a better...

Recently, I shared some notes about building expertise in your career (aka climbing the Y-axis). That post was largely written to set the stage for this one. I wanted to dive deeper into the Y-axis in my career or what I’m calling my “personal moonshot...