Elliot C Smith

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Latest — Sep 2, 2024

Know which type of goals you're chasing

It’s important that you know what kind of company you are working for. In particular, if your company has reached the stage where things are steady and predictable or if they remain mostly unknown. Some companies, especially bigger ones, tend to move in a fixed direction. Goals and projects

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Talk to your users

Once, a long time ago, I was at an event where a local 'business leader' came to talk. Their talk was the story of their business, how they grew it and what made it successful. By some metrics their business was a success. It wasn't a

Notes from the four Silicon Valley Product Group Books

Over the last three months I read all four of the currently published SVPG books They cover a large range of topics in what they call ‘the product operating model’. This model spans high level product strategy, day to day product discovery and fields like product marketing. I recently collated

Avoiding antipatterns in product discovery

Product discovery works best when you have no favourite ideas. Spending time with real users validating problems and potential solutions is a critical part of good product discovery. Often ideas that sound great around the office white board fall flat when tested with real users. An important part of maturing

Book Review: INSPIRED by Marty Cagan of SVPG

I have found myself on somewhat of a SVPG book binge recently. A binge kicked off from an episode of Lenny’s podcast with Marty Cagan on what he calls ‘Product Management Theater’. Product management theater is the idea that many product teams end up doing things that sound like

The Minimum Marketable Difference

There are lots of reasons that startups don’t make it. Sometimes they build the wrong thing. Sometimes they build the right thing too early. Sometimes, amongst all the others, they build something great but can’t convince the world to use it. That’s what this post is about.

My path to working in Product

There was never a moment where I felt that destiny was pulling me towards a career in product. Though I have come to realize that those moments tend to live mostly in fiction. Despite all that, I currently find myself as Head of Product in a growing technology startup. I

Products Should Solve Real Problems

There's an idea that gets thrown around a lot which is to build products (or businesses) to solve problems you have first hand experience with. Solve a problem for yourself. If your career is in tech, especially the 'building tech for tech people' subcategory, it can

Making a living when AI raises the bar.

With the recent release of Sora from Open AI there's once again a flood of online sentiment around the end of all jobs for creatives. The technology is impressive, lets get that out the way early. There's something about video that feels more impressive than text

Edits and Egos

Asking for feedback on your work is an important part of improving. Sometimes, receiving that feedback can feel extremely personal. Whether it’s writing, slides, code or anything else we can tie ourselves up in our creations. Learning to separate ourselves from our work is an important step, one I’