19 products left, but today GrowthBook

Hi friend 👋,

Thanks to my position, I was able to interview a large number of product manager applicants. Conducting PM interviews is the most difficult one because of the job definition. It's difficult to pin down precisely what a product manager does, even if you're in need of one, because the position is still developing. I've seen several PMs, both good and poor, who surprise you with the strengths they bring to the position. And all product managers work on numerous teams, including the development team, the product management team, and, on occasion, the design team. Because these teams function in different ways for different products, the missing parts in these teams are shifting as well. Consider a B2C firm that serves millions of consumers through a mobile app and a B2B company that serves companies through its own dashboard. The nature, pressure, and working style are radically different. During one of my interviews, a B2C applicant inquired innocently, "How do you run your A/B tests?"

A/B testing is another interesting topic to explore. Most of the time, I heard this as groupA seeing the interfaceA and groupB seeing the interfaceB; we check the result with a given metric; we observe who performs better. This strategy has billions of counter-arguments, but it is a typical way to design a product. However, if you determine your next step solely by checking next step possibilities, you may wind yourself in the wrong spot. Anyway… Yes, running A/B tests for enterprise companies is difficult and quite pointless. We have feature flags and canary releases instead. Perhaps we can explore why we believe this is the best strategy to develop the product in another post.

Today, GrowthBook is our product.

GrowthBook is an open source experimentation and feature flag platform. It is available in both SaaS and on-premise versions, with the on-premise component being absolutely free to use. They constructed the product in collaboration with the community, and the more I see this approach, the more optimistic I am about the products' future. Someone will probably transform that idea into a framework and name it community-led growth. Maybe they already have. You probably know how feature flags operate, and GrowthBook makes it very simple to use them. It has become ingrained in our culture.

I believe that having an open source on-premise version of your SaaS solution can be a terrific long-term plan for growing your business if you control your burn multiples and have a runway to go. I love how they manage their business without creating anything flashy; instead, they focused on the fundamental functioning and refined it to perfection.

We’ll talk again tomorrow.

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