All of our Product articles

X1's Path to Product-Market Fit — How the Consumer Credit Card Company Pulled off a Pandemic Pivot

X1's Path to Product-Market Fit — How the Consumer Credit Card Company Pulled off a Pandemic Pivot

In our "Paths to Product-Market Fit" series, X1 founder and CEO Deepak Rao sits down with First Round partner Todd Jackson to share the dramatic story of how his company pivoted during the pandemic and found product-market fit with a bold launch strategy.
Pull, Don’t Push: How Catalysts Overcome Barriers and Drive Product Adoption

Pull, Don’t Push: How Catalysts Overcome Barriers and Drive Product Adoption

Marketing expert Jonah Berger has spent years probing into the science behind changing people’s minds, and why becoming an effective change agent is about lowering barriers, not pushing harder. He distilled five of the most common barriers into a simple framework and walks us through it.
Retool’s Path to Product-Market Fit — Lessons for Getting to 100 Happy Customers, Faster

Retool’s Path to Product-Market Fit — Lessons for Getting to 100 Happy Customers, Faster

In our "Paths to Product-Market Fit" series, Retool founder and CEO David Hsu sits down with First Round partner Todd Jackson to share how the internal tools company hypothesized, tested and iterated its way to 100 happy customers
Maven's Path to Product-Market Fit — Lessons for Leveraging Community in the Early Days

Maven's Path to Product-Market Fit — Lessons for Leveraging Community in the Early Days

In the second post for our new series, "Paths to Product-Market Fit," Maven founder and CEO Kate Ryder sits down with First Round partner Todd Jackson to share the inside story of the first female-led telemedicine startup to achieve unicorn status.
Airtable's Path to Product-Market Fit — Lessons for Building Horizontal Products

Airtable's Path to Product-Market Fit — Lessons for Building Horizontal Products

In the first post for our new series, "Paths to Product-Market Fit," Airtable co-founder Andrew Ofstad sits down with First Round partner Todd Jackson to share the inside story of the no-code platform's long journey and the challenges they came across while building a horizontal product.
How Product Strategy Fails in the Real World — What to Avoid When Building Highly-Technical Products

How Product Strategy Fails in the Real World — What to Avoid When Building Highly-Technical Products

Why does strategy tend to stall when the rubber hits the road? Nate Stewart, Chief Product Officer of Cockroach Labs, shares an essential guide for creating a resilient strategy that’s still standing next year.
Don't Let Growth Hurt Your Margins: A 4-Step Pricing Framework to Build Products With Scalable Unit Economics

Don't Let Growth Hurt Your Margins: A 4-Step Pricing Framework to Build Products With Scalable Unit Economics

Pricing pro Dee Sahni shares a highly customizable framework for tweaking your monetization and pricing model so that it scales with you, not against you as the company grows. She then applies the 4-step framework to household-name companies like Amazon, Netflix and Uber.
Set “Non-Goals” and Build a Product Strategy Stack — Lessons For Product Leaders

Set “Non-Goals” and Build a Product Strategy Stack — Lessons For Product Leaders

Ravi Mehta, former CPO at Tinder & Product Exec at TripAdvisor, shares his framework for crafting a crisp product strategy for startups — a 5-step system called the "Product Strategy Stack." He also makes the case for setting "non-goals" and using an alternative to OKRs.
Finding Language/Market Fit: How to Make Customers Feel Like You’ve Read Their Minds

Finding Language/Market Fit: How to Make Customers Feel Like You’ve Read Their Minds

After more than a decade of running B2B growth teams at PayPal and investing at 500 Startups, Matt Lerner now spends his days helping early-stage startups with growth. He's seen firsthand how changes in a handful of words can yield jaw-dropping differences in conversion.