About this episode
In today’s episode, I’m joined by John Felushko, a product manager at LabStats who impressed me after we recently had a 1x1 call together. John and his team have developed a successful product that helps universities track and optimize their software and hardware usage so schools make smart investments. However, John also shares how culture and value are very tied together—and why their product isn’t a fit for every school, and every country. John shares how important customer relationships are , how his team designs great analytics user experiences, how they do user research, and what he learned making high-end winter sports products that’s relevant to leading a SAAS analytics product. Combined with John’s background in history and the political economy of finance, John paints some very colorful stories about what they’re getting right—and how they’ve course corrected over the years at LabStats.
Highlights/ Skip to:
(0:46) What is the LabStats product
(2:59) Orienting analytics around customer value instead of IT/data
(5:51) "Producer of Persistently Profitable Product Process"
(11:22) How they make product adjustments based on previous failures
(15:55) Why a lack of cultural understanding caused LabStats to fail internationally
(18:43) Quantifying value beyond dollars and cents
(25:23) How John is able to work so closely with his customers without barriers
(30:24) Who makes up the LabStats product research team
(35:04) How strong customer relationships help inform the UX design process
(38:29) Getting senior management to accept that you can't regularly and accurately predict when you’ll be feature-complete and ship
(43:51) Where John learned his skills as a successful product manager
(47:20) Where you can go to cultivate the non-technical skills to help you become a better SAAS analytics product leader
(51:00) What advice would John Felushko have given himself 10 years ago?
(56:19) Where you can find more from John Felushko
Quotes from Today’s Episode
“The product process is [essentially] really nothing more than the scientific method applied to business. Every product is an experiment - it has a hypothesis about a problem it solves. At LabStats [we have a process] where we go out and clearly articulate the problem. We clearly identify who the customers are, and who are [people at other colleges] having that problem. Incrementally and as inexpensively as possible, [we] test our solutions against th
