After countless hours of work and calendars filled with meetings, your app is ready to submit to the app stores. How will you get users to discover the product of your hard work, increase adoption, and download it? App Store Optimization (ASO) and paid marketing are the keys to a successful launch.

ASO can be broken down into two main sections: keyword optimization and creative optimization. Paid marketing efforts include running ads from platforms that can not only help your new user downloads, but also offer organic coefficients. Using both of these marketing strategies to their fullest potential will yield the highest results for your app launch and over time as your app matures.

Keyword optimization drives ASO visibility. You want users to be able to find your app organically by searching for a keyword, and seeing your app in the search results.

Keyword optimization is a crucial part of increasing organic discoverability. Selecting relevant and specific keywords with high search volume before launch will help set your app up for success. If your app is ranked for these keywords, then your visibility will increase because more users will see your app in the search results.

When you deploy a new build, the store algorithms will begin to merchandise your app for roughly 3-4 weeks. During this process, the algorithms will scan the metadata for targeted keywords and possibly merchandise your app for additional rankings. Starting with strong optimized metadata helps Apple and Google easily understand your app from day one. Take note of which keywords or phrases perform the best using ASO software, and test them in your next build.

Optimizing your metadata can help your app rank for hundreds or even thousands of keywords and phrases, effectively expanding your overall organic presence. As you gain impressions and installs from these rankings, your app will build relevance in the eyes of the stores. This can, in turn, increase rankings -- which further expands visibility.

Keyword discoverability will allow users looking to find an app like yours to discover it. But after a user sees your app, will they download it? Creative and conversion optimization drive the download part of your ASO strategy. All traffic eventually leads to your app store listing. Your on-page search and product page elements need to convince users to tap to get your app, and not a competitor’s.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but effective app store creative can be worth thousands of installs.

Optimizing your creative assets will improve your conversion rate, maximizing the impact of your increased keyword visibility. Increasing your conversion rate can help your app climb up the ladder of keyword rankings, because app stores take conversion into account.

When working on creative, start by implementing best practices to improve relevance with your target audience and increase conversion. For example: highlight key features in the screenshot copy or in-app UI. Users are more inclined to install an app if they immediately recognize their search queries, whether it's through keywords or in-app imagery.

A/B testing tools are also important for optimizing your metadata and creative. Testing gives you quantifiable data to understand which aspects perform the best. You can test various aspects, like which colors convert the best, or which keywords to highlight. From there you can build upon the success of previous builds to continually improve performance.

New apps will get little organic traffic because they don't have high rankings for high volume keywords -- it takes time to build relevance for the algorithm. This makes it hard for users to find a new app, without a little help.

Paid marketing from healthy channels, like Apple Search Ads, Google Ads, or Facebook Ads, will increase the volume of traffic to your app store listing, and help stimulate the store’s algorithm to index your listing at a faster rate. This has three benefits:

Improve organic keyword ranking visibility

Increase your user base at a quicker pace

Paid traffic is different from organic, because you're directly bidding for placements that can appear either above, or entirely outside of, organic search results. These paid placements can be at the top of the search results for Apple Search Ads, or a banner on a YouTube video for Google Ads. As your listing gains installs, you become more relevant in the eyes of the store, potentially increasing overall organic rankings.

Each paid channel has unique pros, cons, and a different level of influence on organic. For example, Apple Search Ads can have a direct impact on how your app ranks for keywords, and will display the screenshots already used in the App Store. Facebook Ads, on the other hand, will help with the overall volume of installs with an indirect impact on rankings. Facebook Ads also require creative assets made specifically for Facebook.

Start with the channel that best aligns with your marketing goals, budget, and team resources to help scale your user base. As your app usage and business grow, you can look into adding more channels to capture additional demographics.

ASO keyword and creative optimization together form an iterative process of research, testing/deployment, measurement, and improvement repeating. This cycle of continual improvement, paired with paid marketing to boost traffic, will set your app us for success.

Even if you've developed the best app ever, no one will know about it if they can't find it. ASO helps your organic visibility, by targeting relevant keywords and improving conversion performance with creative assets. Paid marketing supports your organic visibility, by driving additional traffic volume. Avoid a slow start after launch by using a combination of ASO and paid marketing strategies to get your app in front of the right users.

 is a global leader in App Store Optimization with more than 11 years of experience optimizing and marketing apps. We offer the leading enterprise ASO technology and agency services, providing support to clients around the world. Our company is trusted by thousands of enterprise brands and leading startups including Microsoft, LinkedIn, Bethesda, SWEAT, GrubHub, McAfee and many others.

App Store Optimization tips for your product launch

Today we're speaking with Paul Ortchanian, who runs 

, a Montreal-based product consultancy that helps businesses of all sizes develop and implement strong product management practices.

Thanks for joining us, Paul! First, can you tell us a little bit about your journey? How’d you get started, and how’d you end up where you are today running Bain Public?

Sure! I started off as an engineer. I did about 10 years of engineering, mainly on the front-end side of things. I was very close to UX, too, and eventually ended up managing scope on bigger projects. And when you’re working on big products, you really start to realize how important the management of scope and expectation are to creating clarity.

Because I loved UX as well as working on the business side of things, I made a leap of faith and became a Product Manager in San Francisco. I joined a startup and learned things the way many product managers do — the hard way.

Eventually I came to Montreal and realized we had a nice little startup ecosystem, but most of the companies here didn’t have a culture that was product-led. It was the same old story of, “do what the boss says.” These business weren’t really solving customer problems, but instead trying to build as many features as they could without really asking themselves the question: is this adding value?

So I decided to start a company that focuses mainly on evangelizing product management to the Montreal community. I try to bring some of my key learnings from San Francisco to Montreal, and implement product-led thinking.

We have a mix of companies here, both early startups and later-stage ones. Regardless of stage, many are in denial for awhile, and eventually realize that product is important. But they’re not sure how to go about improving things. And that’s become our niche.

That’s great. Thinking about organizational transformation, let’s say you have a bigger company that doesn’t have a very effective product culture. What are some things you’ve seen that are signs a company needs help, or needs to be thinking about product in a different way?

First up, defining what a product manager does is quite important. So if I were to ask the company’s product managers, what do you do every day? How do you define your role in your company? Ideally, the answer is “we’re taking ownership of a portion of the company’s growth, through the features that we’re launching, and we’re able to help the business achieve its next financial milestone.”

There needs to be some acknowledgement that sales or marketing are not the primary drivers of business growth. And that the product itself is going to contribute positively, by increasing revenue through upselling, preventing customers from leaving, finding ways to charge more for certain things, adding ways to acquire new customers, and so on.

We’ll ask the product team, “what’s the strategy? Are you making large bets on unproven markets? Are you competitively launching new features? Are you extending a product functionality to an established market? Or are you simply shipping with little discussion about impact?” If it’s the latter — simply shipping, with little discussion about impact — that’s a project manager, not a product manager. Because they’re being told what to do.

So then I go to the product leadership team, usually the C-suite, and take a reverse lens. I’ll ask them, “what do you expect out of a product manager?”

And you can tell based on their answers if it’s an organization that celebrates shipping features more than it celebrates solving customer problems, or business problems. That’s the starting point.

I like that framing. So let’s say someone is in a culture like that, and they want to implement better product-led thinking. But they’re not in the C-suite. What are some things they can do?

Usually I try to define the strategy with the product leadership team before defining product management. It’s a question for the founders, the top-level decision makers. Usually that includes sales and marketing, operations, the CTO, and so on. And the question really is, “is this plane being built as it’s flying off the cliff, or is there a plan? How do you empower your product management team through processes and tools?”

It just comes down to asking some pretty tough questions. The best question I’ve been able to ask is, “do you know which features in your product are contributing toward revenue? And directly or indirectly, which are the largest customers that are using those features?” Take a very metrics-driven approach.

And if they’re unable to answer that, and they say “well, the product sells itself,” or, “we have no clue, because we have an amazing sales team and they’re able to sell anything,” or “our marketing team works really hard to bring in new customers,” — then, they really don’t know.

I recently had a startup founder email me his monthly report, outlining an increase in the number of commits to his main code repository. He was celebrating that as a win. And he was really happy about a questionnaire they sent out that had a lot of responses. I wrote him back and said, “you know, those are very shallow KPIs.”

You can’t run a business focused on shallow KPIs. You need to know how much growth each feature is generating, and how each feature is contributing to achieving your next financial milestone. If you can’t answer that question, then you don’t have a product-led culture.

But once people see how that type of thinking can contribute to the business, it can start to infiltrate the company. On our end, we come in to help define that step-by-step process, as long as the leadership team is willing to make the change.

What are some challenges you’re facing right now in your role, running Bain Public?

First of all, doing what we do, coming in and saying to a company, “you’re gonna have to make all this change,” — that’s a pretty tough sell. You need a lot of credibility. People want to know your background, and they want to know you know about their industry. Oftentimes I hear, “what do you know about the [healthcare / fintech / etc.] space?” But it’s not about that. The reality is, our job is to come in, interview the team, get to know their product culture, and help them put in place a process to empower product managers and inject this type of thinking in their company. They’ll always be the experts at what they do. We’re just there to organize priorities, help work through the roadmap to make sure it’s contributing to the growth of the organization. So this is an ongoing challenge, creating the organic word of mouth and the pedigree to allow us to be credible.

The second challenge we face is the product management culture within organizations. Oftentimes you’ll get someone who wasn’t hired as a product manager — maybe they came in as a business analyst, a UX designer, a marketer, or something like that — and they’ve been effectively given the role of product manager.

In many cases, they’re extremely busy, they’re running the show without any work-life balance, and they’re just unwilling to stop and make changes.

I read a Reddit thread recently that talked about how the role of a PM is a lot less glorious than what you see portrayed. And that’s true. A lot of it is a grind. You’ve got to drop something to jump into a customer support call, and then you run to a sales meeting to make sure the sales team doesn’t sell stuff that doesn’t exist, and then you head over to marketing to explain the features you’re actually shipping, and help them with website copy to make sure it’s accurate. It’s a grind.

People get caught up in it and think, there’s no way to progress here. External people can’t come in and coach me. It’s denial, really. Because there’s so much growing and learning that needs to be done in this space.

They might be busy debating whether to use Kanban or Agile, but ignoring the fact that every day their boss, who suffers from Shiny Object Syndrome, comes in and whiplashes the team with a new feature. So which problem do they really want to solve: Kanban vs. Agile, or the fact that their boss doesn’t let them have a roadmap?

Willingness to be challenged needs to come from the leadership team and PMs alike.

By definition, you must be dealing almost exclusively with clients that are suffering from these challenges but at least looking to resolve them.

Yes, though I’d say there’s a large percentage of clients we work with that don’t even know what product management is.

That’s another problem. Maybe they’re brand new companies, they might even be pre-seed or at the ideation stage. Ideally, they’re looking to implement a product-led culture from the get-go, because the longer they delay, the more problems they’re going to have in terms of communication and culture down the road.

You just mentioned Shiny Object Syndrome. I think sometimes people are resistant to having a data-led approach to product decisions, because they think they know best, or their solution is new and they think the customer doesn’t know what they want. So they’re just going to be the visionary that drives this product.

How can a PM help facilitate a more rigorous approach to decision making?

, which is our framework. We bring in the entire product leadership team plus the PM. So that’s usually 4-5 people — CEO, CFO, CMO, etc., plus the PM. And we basically conduct interviews. We allow them to express what they think the priorities are from every angle.

Sometimes it’s not about making the right decision, it’s about making sure you have the right process, which is this collaborative discussion. This quest for learning together. So if you’re a PM, you’re in a position where you can get everyone together and help them learn. What are the constraints the sales team is facing? What about the marketing team? What’s customer support hearing?

And then the goal is to come face-to-face with the really hard problems, together. That way, there’s no one-sided bias from the sales team, or the marketing team, or the engineering team.

It’s all about asking the right questions, too. When they say they need something, follow up with a question: “how is this going to help the business? How is this going to allow us to achieve our financial targets? If this is a great idea, who’s the user that’s going to use it?”

This process of collective learning helps create trust in the PM, because people can see that the PM isn’t just dictating things. There are no egos in the room.

You might not bat for a thousand, but at least you’ll be able to hit, say, a 60% average in shipping the right features. And over the long run, that’s probably good enough.

Great advice. So how can you balance short, medium and long term goals when setting a roadmap?

It’s like wearing glasses — the closer things are, the sharper they get. The further out you look, the more blurry it gets. The crucial thing is always getting the next three months right, facing your immediate decisions.

Beyond that, your customers might change. Your competitors might change. Your market might change. You’ve got to be able to reevaluate every three months or so. That’s why we called our company Bain Public, because in French, bain public is a public bath. It’s a place where you go to clean up on a regular basis.

So the idea is, every three months a company cleans up their roadmap. Reevaluates what’s happening. It’s not about having full clarity on a 6 to 12 month roadmap. It’s mainly about having a high level mission.

You can have long term goals, but know that they’re blurry.

And in terms of setting top priorities, it’s best to come face to face with the worst problems. Often the company’s worst problems are the customer’s worst problems. Maybe something is broken and it’s creating a ton of support tickets. And you’re stuck with one resource who’s managing 600 tickets a day, which is humiliating. When you think about it that way — what’s humiliating? That gives you a good idea where to start.

What about a new startup that’s just launching for the first time? How can they think about prioritization?

Well I guess that’s your biggest problem, no one is using the product yet. First up you want to create your whole ecosystem. How does somebody buy your product? What happens post-purchase? Map out every step you want a customer to take from sale, to regular usage, and the output the product provides.

Then you ask yourself, “where are we faking it till we make it?”

When you look at your process, what you’ve built and what you’re faking, where are there gaps that could create problems for the customer? If something important isn’t yet automated, or data is being stored somewhere it could easily be lost, you probably want to start there.

What about PMs early in their career? What’s something you wish you’d known earlier?

I would’ve loved to be coached from the get-go. I used to be the guy who came into the room with the data, the numbers. Everything you read about product management, people are telling you to be an expert in the data, the market, your competitors, your industry. So you’ve spent time with the CTO and the engineering team. You’re an expert in the product and the database structure. You’re in sales and marketing meetings. And you think, “okay, I guess I’m an expert on everything and I’m here to tell everyone what the facts are.”

The thing is, product managers also need to be able to influence people. You need to be able to hear them out, hear their concerns, and frame the features you’re proposing within the context of their problems. And if you’re not listening, and you’re just the guy who’s coming in with the facts, you’re going to get challenged or pushed aside. And that was my biggest issue, originally. In my first PM role, I was fired. Not because I was a bad PM, but because I had a big mouth.

Once you lose credibility, you lose the room. It’s like being a hockey coach. It’s not because you’re bad, it’s because the players don’t want to play for you anymore.

The average lifespan of a PM within a company is often a year. It’s ridiculously short. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that PMs have so much to assimilate in a short amount of time.

I talk a lot, and I had to learn the hard way to be a good listener. Maybe it’s not a good idea to go out there presenting a list of 10 Reasons Why We Shouldn’t Build This Feature, because the sales team is going to just go around you to the CEO and get their feature built.

That’s good advice, and very true. Last couple questions! What’s a product that you’re obsessed with right now?

One that I’ve always liked — I’ve been using it for about 10 years now, I think — is 

. It’s basically just a big to-do list. But the way the user experience has been thought out is great. Every feature adds value. I can’t get out of it, it’s just so much part of my day-to-day.

Any recent podcasts or books you’ve discovered that you’d recommend?

. It’s basically Product Management 101. I find the industry is becoming more mature, and I’m really happy that there are books like this that are the real deal.

For more from Paul on product management, dive into

. And make sure you never miss a Product Thinking interview — sign up for our newsletter below.

An  interview  with  Paul  Ortchanian

Welcome back to our Product Thinking series, where we interview product leaders from a range of roles and organizations to learn about the challenges they're facing, lessons they've learned and advice they have to share for others in the field. Today we're thrilled to be chatting with Emma Townley-Smith, Group Product Manager at 

Hey Emma! First up, we'd love to know more about your background. What have you worked on in the past, and how'd you end up in your current role? What drew you to product work?

I was drawn to product work in college because I really wanted to understand why certain products were more successful than others. When I looked at a blowout success like Facebook, it wasn’t obvious to me why it succeeded instead of MySpace. Or why (at the time) Snapchat was growing so quickly in popularity. I was deeply curious about what made people want to try something new, or switch their solution, or pay.

I studied Product Design, which helped me build a skillset in user research and problem-first (rather than solution-first) thinking. I started to get a qualitative appreciation for how you assess whether your product is working, and how you build momentum and a story around your early interactions with users.

All throughout school, I worked part time -- by the time I graduated I had worked at four different companies that ranged from seed stage to Fortune 500. I knew that I wanted to build foundational PM skills on a larger team before returning to an early-stage company, because they needed more leadership from their few product managers than I could offer as a new grad. I built strong consumer foundations in the Capital One Innovation Lab before joining Livongo as an early PM. Over three years, I’ve had the opportunity to grow from an IC working on a collection of features to a manager in more of a GM role, managing a team of PMs and owning multiple product lines.

What are the unique challenges you're facing in your role right now?

For me personally, I’m in a demanding IC role and managing a team for the first time. I was nervous that the two sets of responsibilities might compete with each other, but they’ve been symbiotic. In order to be effective myself and to maximize the whole team’s impact, there’s no time to dwell on the easily reversible decisions, or to micromanage. The total pressure on my time helps me prioritize my own work clearly and empower my team to move forward.

Awesome. And when it comes to product roles, what would you say is your unique ability that has allowed you to succeed?

Curiosity has been critically important. There’s no formal training that tells you how to manage hardware and software together, how to persuade executive stakeholders, or how B2B2C is different from your previous B2C role. At this point I have approached a lot of complex product situations without prior experience, and I’ve figured out how to do my homework. Research what other companies have done. Look for a common framework that people use to solve this kind of problem successfully. Interview other PMs. Ask the “obvious” questions and make sure you have the right context.

What's one thing you've worked on that you're really proud of?

 and behavior change work that we did at Livongo over the last few years. It’s common both for machine learning and behavior change to be buzzwords without an implementation that’s meaningful to the business’s goals. We’ve worked really hard to bring together technology and strategy to create experiences that actually help people introduce new healthy behaviors, like 

When it comes to product, how do you know when to trust data, and when to trust your intuition? Have you ever taken a risk based on your intuition that paid off?

It’s a funny question, because my intuition is based on data -- data from past analyses, experiences, or conversations. Most of the product intuition “misses” I’ve seen come from a context mismatch -- trying to apply past experience that aren’t relevant to the current problem. When making assumptions, I’m careful to think about whether the “data” behind my intuition matches the current situation. Is it a similar type of product, objective, customer, team, company stage, etc? Am I sure my past experiences apply here?

When I’m approaching a decision, I generally think -- have we put the right time and effort constraints on data-gathering relative to the importance of the decision? (To make 

, is this a reversible decision that may be appropriate to make based on intuition, or do the consequences merit more information?) Given those constraints, do we have all the important inputs we can reasonably gather before we pull the trigger?

I’ve found that a lot of content work can be successfully driven by strong intuition about what users want. I didn’t do research or analysis before starting 

 (a leading Medium publication on product management), but I knew from my experiences in the early career PM community that there was an appetite for real, on-the-job anecdotes instead of high-level frameworks. I spent about a year writing before things really started to take off, but we’ve grown organically now to over 35,000 followers.

Congrats, that's a big achievement! Let's talk about other products — what's your favorite app right now? Why?

Not sure I have a favorite app that will wow anyone, but I can think of a recent moment where an app impressed me. I recently became a homeowner, and went through the process of hiring contractors to help with repairs. I was really impressed with the templates that Yelp offered to make sure that you requested quotes with the right contextual information, and the way that they seamlessly delivered your quote request to more vendors to help you get a rapid response. I was expecting to do research about what kind of quote request to send, and to call multiple people myself, but Yelp effortlessly expanded from its core “search” job to meet these other needs. And there was no advertising or feature education involved -- it was a seamless experience within my existing pattern of use.

Great example. Last question! Has there been a recent podcast interview that's really wowed you?

 from The Knowledge Project. His message really resonated with me -- it’s easy to go into work every day on autopilot. You have to approach each day with the intentional goal to get better. You should be watching for emotional reactions or confusion, and in those situations ask not what went wrong, but how you should update your mental model for a better understanding of how to be effective.

. And be sure to subscribe to our newsletter below to get more Product Thinking interviews from our team at Input Logic!

An  interview  with  Emma  Townley-Smith

This is part two of our new series, Product Thinking. We're featuring regular interviews with super-sharp product managers, leaders and thinkers from a huge range of companies. Our last post was 

an interview with Den Delimarsky from Microsoft

Today, we're thrilled to be chatting with Andrew Yu, Product Lead on the Biden campaign and a former PM at LinkedIn.

Hi Andrew! Thanks for joining us. First, can you tell us more about your background, how you got into product work, and how you came to be where you are today?

So, like many product folks, if not all, there’s no traditional background. I didn’t study anything product related in college. But once I graduated, about 10 years ago, I read some of Paul Graham’s essays and there was a lot about product management. At the time, I had studied politics and wanted to go into politics because I wanted to create impact. But then I realized, that’s such a long-term way to try to create impact, through politics. And when I heard about product management, I thought, not only does this sound really interesting from an intellectual point of view, but also you get to have direct, immediate impact. You work at the intersection of all these teams. So for me, having impact was the theme that tied everything together. And I thought, I’ve gotta get from DC out to San Francisco and become a product manager.

Back then, the only way you could really do it was to first become an engineer. So I tried my hardest to learn how to code. And then I got a job as a software engineer. And mind you, I say that super casually, but at the time it was one of the most difficult things I’d ever done. But I made it through and then transitioned from engineering to product. For me, that was always the goal.

Cool. How’d you learn to code, and what was your journey into product?

Yeah, let’s dig into that! It was a combination of three things. First was just teaching myself to code. The second was talking about it to almost everyone I could. That was key. I went to meetups, I was a complete n00b. I literally remember asking someone, “what is an API?” That’s how fresh I was. And then third, I got hired to code and was able to learn on the job. That was one of the luckiest parts of the whole journey. In your career your get maybe two or three things that are just complete luck. And for me, that was definitely one of them. But part of the reason it happened was because I had been talking about it so much. I was networking a lot. I was just obsessed with it at the the time. And this startup team said, “you know what? We know you want to code, we know you’re this young kid who’s energetic and wants to make it happen. So we’ll actually teach you on the job, if you’ll join and be a ‘do everything’ kind of person.” It was really great.

From there, I got my first product gig, and then I asked myself, ‘what other problem spaces do I wanna work in?’ I moved to an education technology company where I really learned the ins and outs of product management. And then I went to LinkedIn. That’s where I really learned some of the best practices. Their processes and operations are so well established.

And recently I left LinkedIn, and worked on the Biden campaign. It’s been one of the most unique and interesting product experiences I’ve had.

That’s a timely question! I hadn’t really been coding since I went into product. It was a means to an end. But I recently started coding again, just for fun. The reality is, you really don’t need to code to be a product manager. It’s not like it used to be. Now you’ve got people coming in from MBA programs, management consulting, all over the place. But there are definitely a big group of PMs who are former engineers.

I would code here and there. I also took a data science class because I knew it was important, especially if I wanted to work in a machine learning space. You need to understand how to implement models.

Can you tell us more about what you’ve been working on with the Biden campaign?

I can tell you as much as I’m allowed to! The short answer is, it’s still going on, although it’s a little less involved now. I’m on the post-election team, addressing the question, ‘what happens after election day?’ That required a lot of setup. There’s a lot of work to be done leading up to it. The team is essentially focused on election protection.

Yeah. I mean, it was all hands on deck for seven days a week for a couple of weeks.

Really interesting. How was that to work on, given that you’d studied politics, then went into tech, and now you’ve been working kind of at the intersection of those two things?

That’s a great question. In a lot of ways, you caught me at a very specific time in my career. This is not at all what I thought I would be doing. I left LinkedIn in August, and it was one of those things where you make a move and opportunities appear. I left on good terms and I was just looking for my next step. And if I were still working at LinkedIn, or anywhere full-time, I would not have even been open to doing something like this. That was part of why I left — I knew that I was trying to go into the next phase of my career.

I’m a very firm believer that are phases to your career. You have to instigate change, because it won’t happen on its own.

That’s what’s happened my entire career. Questions like, am I going to learn to code, or not? Am I going to move to SF, or not? Am I going to leave this role, or not? And it was just one of those times. Of course it takes a lot of thought and planning ahead of time.

How did you end up joining the Biden campaign?

Because of Twitter. Twitter is the reason we’re even talking, right?! I always knew it was powerful, but when you actually start taking action on Twitter, and you get real outcomes from it, you think, ‘oh okay, there’s so much here that’s untapped!’

This wasn’t even my plan. I was planning to just be in a creative mode, take a break, work on stuff I want to work on. But someone who was involved in the Biden campaign posted a role, I connected with them, and I didn’t end up getting that role but they reached out to me with this one.

Awesome! Do you have advice for people who want to engage more on Twitter? How do they start taking advantage of it?

Yeah! There are two main things that, if you do them, are pretty much bulletproof. You’ll get something out of it. First, focus on giving and contributing above everything else. And what I love about that is, it’s not only altruistic. Not only are you contributing to others, but you’re also helping yourself, building up your brand. 

I wrote an article about what I call ‘servant networking

. You’ve heard of servant leadership, which is about serving not leading. And it’s the same with networking. If you keep giving people stuff, the key is not to expect anything in return. Guaranteed, good things will come back to you. But then again, the whole is to do this mind trick where you truly do not expect anything in return.

One useful way to contribute, though, is to share summaries. I recently saw someone say, “hey, there’s a book that’s really popular right now, I know you don’t have time to read it so here’s a summary.” That’s contributing! That’s serving.

 course with David Perell, and it really made me see the internet differently. It was dope. One of the main things he emphasizes is to write so that people can discover you. It helps you connect to people around the world.

The second thing when it comes to Twitter, is this: DM everyone. Everyone is reachable! Maybe people don’t realize that yet. I’ve straight up just started treating Twitter like Slack. It’s a Slack where everyone in the world is on it. So I just DM people, and I’ve managed to get on Zoom calls with people who are way more senior, people that I normally wouldn’t be able to talk to.

That’s great advice! So let’s chat about product management. What do you think is your unique ability that has allowed you to succeed in product roles? How did you develop it?

Good question. I’ve heard a variant of that question recently, which a lot of senior people ask. It’s “what’s your superpower?” And I think what that question is getting at is, how does your judgment work? Why is something your superpower? It’s really interesting to think about.

For me, I think it’s identifying skills gaps and talent gaps, and filling them. Realizing, “oh okay, I’m not great at this thing. Experimentation, for example. So I want to fill that role as well as I possibly can.” Maybe if I can’t fill the role, I can read all about it and learn more. But my unique ability is identifying those gaps, and filling them ASAP.

You can go pretty far being highly personable, a people person. But nothing beats having the skills. So developing the skills, identifying when there are gaps, and filling those gaps ASAP.

When you’re hiring and trying to fill a skill gap of your own, how do you choose the right person?

Yeah, that’s really key. It’s all about having the right team to help you evaluate. Of course, if you’re at a giant company they have processes around this. But if you’re at a startup, maybe you provide your opinion, but someone with different expertise on your team may provide a completely different point of view. So it’s huge to be able to know when you can’t identify something, and know who to ask for an opinion.

Definitely! So, circling back to LinkedIn, what’s something you worked on that you’re really proud of?

I’d say it was the My Network tab. When you open LinkedIn right now, it’s the tab next to the homepage. Basically, our team’s mission was to help people connect to the right people and build their networks. When I joined, that page was just about connecting to other people. By the time I left, we had created an ecosystem where you could discover all the different things on LinkedIn – groups, events, pages, interests, etc. We call them ‘edges,’ — if you follow something, that’s an edge. If you join a group, that’s an edge. If you attend an event, that’s an edge in the LinkedIn graph. So we built that page to connect people to edges. What I’m most proud of is helping to create this entire discovery ecosystem.

What was the biggest challenge you faced in doing that?

We worked with so many teams to make this project happen. The follows team, which is completely separate from the growth team that I was on. We worked with the groups team, the machine learning recommendations team, the team that builds pages. There were so many teams involved, and from the outside it may not look like that. And that’s the goal, for the product not to reflect that. But internally, it involved a lot of collaboration. Every team has their own goals and metrics. So you need a lot of meetings, a lot of alignment, which is really challenging, but really rewarding. You get to see that to build something like this, it takes a lot of human beings.

Definitely. When it comes to making product decisions, how do you know when to trust data and when to trust your intuition?

Well, I’ve heard intuition defined as something that results from having accrued a ton of experience and data. Personally, in terms of Myers-Briggs types I’m an ENFJ, a feeler. I love doing things based on feel. So I had to really train on using data early in my career. In general, the first thing I do is trust the data. In general, over-relying on intuition can go wrong. Usually people rely on what I would call ‘perceived intuition,’ when they don’t actually have it. Intuition is almost a privilege, you build it up after years of experience. I’ve seen certain director-level people at LinkedIn who can make a call because it’s clear to them. They’ve seen so much data already over the years that they know the answer. But you should always trust the data, assuming it’s good data.

What’s your favorite app right now, and why?

Roam Research. It’s hard to explain, it’s not a note-taking app per se. But I live in it now. Here’s what’s interesting about it: products are meant to solve a problem based on a user need. Why I like Roam so much is that it does what some of the best products do, which is show you a need that you didn’t even really know you had. Networked thought, connecting thoughts. I didn’t even realize that was something I would benefit from. I used Evernote for 10 years. I always wanted the ability to pull in blocks of text from other notes. I had this desire, but there was a next step above it that I personally hadn’t seen, which they did, where you can connect different notes to each other — not just reference them, but actually connect them to each other. So I’m obsessed with it. It’s a great tool.

If someone wanted to get started in product and they were just beginning their career, what would you suggest they do next?

 as you can. Personally, I’ve given a couple talks there. They have people who are actual product managers, who are talking about the topics they want to talk about. And Product School provides them a platform and exposure. It’s win-win, and as a result they have so much great content. I’ve been watching their product talks for years. And I’ve learned things from specific talks that have been some of the more valuable lessons in my entire product career. I’ve also watched talks, and then ended up working with the people who gave the talk down the road, which is really reinforcing. Also, you can just reach out to these people! After you’ve watched a talk, send someone a DM. Never say, “hey, great talk. I’d love to pick your brain.” But ask specific questions. Like, “hey, regarding experimentation, you said we should do X, Y and Z. I want to clarify something about that.” Be really precise. And people will often respond. That’s my advice!

. And if you’re enjoying our Product Thinking interviews, make sure you sign up to receive our newsletter below! We have lots more coming up.

An interview with Andrew Yu

Welcome to our new series, Product Thinking! We'll be featuring regular interviews with super-sharp product managers, leaders and thinkers from a huge range of companies. Know someone who you think we should interview? Drop us a line!

We're stoked to be kicking the series off with an interview with Den Delimarsky, Principle Cloud Advocate at Microsoft.

Hey Den! Tell us more about your background. What have you worked on in the past, and how'd you end up in your current role? What drew you to product work?

I grew up always wanting to work in the IT industry in some shape or form, but when I thought about it, it was largely around the software engineering discipline. That is — I had no idea in my high school days that a product management track was even an option. Once I got into the computer science program during my college days, I discovered that there was such a thing as PM. I wrote about it in my blog — it was entirely an accident. However, once I discovered that product management is a thing, it was easily the best decision in my life to pursue this career path. The first steps of me being a product manager happened in early 2013, when I was part of a team at Microsoft that was called Home Activities & Experiences (HAX). As a PM intern, I was responsible for helping bring to market an innovative calendar planning solution. I loved the kind of work I could put into the discovery phases, customer interviews, and then be able to see the ideas take shape in close collaboration with my engineering peers. In broad terms, product management combined two of my favorite things — talking to people and the magic of software. Since then, I've worked on the team that shipped Outlook Desktop and Office 365 Groups, after which I jumped on the opportunity to build 

 from scratch, being one of the first PMs on the project. My latest gig was with Amazon, where I helped build parts of the EventBridge service. What I love about being a product manager, and what reaffirms that I made the decision on a daily basis is the sheer scope of work that I get to do — it's practically unlimited. I get to do everything, from talking to people who use the product I am building, to crunching numbers, and mocking up new experience designs.

The challenges are not typical to my role, but likely are typical to the times we're in right now. COVID-19 has shown us that we'll need to adapt to a world with stressors that many of us have not seen before. Folks with kids, homeschooling, travel restrictions — these significantly impact our ability to focus and concentrate on building. The situation that we are in right now requires a degree of empathy from our leaders and peers — not everything will get done the way we planned early in the year. Availability of individuals may shift. Attitudes may shift. We all need to be cognizant of these factors. As one of my mentors says, 

"we're not working remotely. We are working remotely during a global pandemic."

 This is not your typical 'work from home' environment.

What is your unique ability that has allowed you to succeed in product roles?

kill stacking. Something that I've learned from my good friend and mentor 

. The idea behind this is fairly simple — generalization instead of super-specialization. I tend to combine a set of skills to get the job done. For example, I love writing code and working with data. This enabled me to leverage those skills in my career and help me be more efficient with my and my team's time. With code, I am able to quickly put together product prototypes or help unblock the engineering team when they have too much on their plate. I recall in 2017, when my team was tasked with building some documentation infrastructure, one of the tools that needed to be built was temporarily de-prioritized. I knew we had a tight deadline ahead, so I rolled my sleeves and wrote the tool myself. As far as I am aware, it's still in production today. Being able to wrangle data and discern meaningful insights from those that are irrelevant helped me quickly make decisions and settle arguments without having to be bottlenecked by the data science team, since their resources are scarce and likely already spread fairly thin. Notice how I don't say that I will do the work of the data science or engineering teams — they do extensive work, and are vastly more experienced in their domains than I am. I am pretty sure if they looked at some of my original code, they'd be horrified. However, it enables me to move fast and help my team deliver value to customers regularly. To all the folks that I mentor, I always recommend exploring some adjacent fields. Do you like user experience design? Are you a great orator? Do you have a knack for putting together great video reels? Put those skills to use. A product manager who only knows how to talk to customers and write a spec is silo-ed. A product manager who knows how to talk to customers, write a spec, put that into a Figma prototype, and pull the quantitative data to prove or disprove their product hypotheses is a force of nature.

Hard to pinpoint just one thing, to be honest. I've been fortunate to work with really talented individuals in every team that I've been a part of, and we delivered great products. I'd say the most impactful product that I've been a part of was 

 — the technical documentation site for Microsoft. It's an absolutely massive project, with hundreds of stakeholders within the company, and millions of stakeholders outside it. I joined the team in 2015, in the very early planning stages of the site. It was exciting to build something modern, scalable, and with global reach, while considering the legacy of resources such as the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) and TechNet. We completely upended the traditional technical documentation model. No more proprietary systems — it's all on GitHub and written in Markdown. There are multiple modalities that allow you to discover every single API that Microsoft ships for a language, such as the 

. We've built an entirely new experience to aggregate all code samples that Microsoft ships in the 

. And of course I can't neglect mentioning 

 — the service that allows anyone around the globe to get skilled in a variety of technologies, entirely for free. Working as part of the team that delivered all this is what I am most proud of.

How do you foster collaboration within your team? Any tools or processes that are working really well this year?

I am taking a bit of an unorthodox approach here. As someone who worked remotely for the past 4 years, I can confidently say that tools themselves are just that — tools. They don't matter as much as the underlying collaboration culture. You can have fantastic video chat software, but if the culture is not there to work asynchronously, it's not going to help you or your team. One of the things that I try reiterating to my team is that just because we are now not in the office doesn't mean that we need to shift every meeting that we ever had into an online environment. Quite the opposite — this is an opportunity to reevaluate what meetings are really necessary, and where we need to start working offline. It all starts with culture where the team understands the value of not being constantly interrupted by Slack notifications, emails, and Zoom calls. To that extent, to me collaboration means that I show how my team can focus and work when they allocate time for it. I really like the approach that 

 is taking here — they are THE company that knows how to do distributed work right. One of the points that stuck with me, that I see a lot of teams fail at, is the fact that communication is not tied to calendars. Way too often we wait for 

 That's a completely unnecessary roadblock. Why not write a one page document that outlines the pros and cons of an issue, and I will get back with feedback when I have time, if it's not urgent. Or write an email, and I will respond with some thoughts whenever I am not focused on writing the product vision outline. The best way to collaborate is to build enough flex in your process that accounts for everyone's work styles and time allocations. And of course, meetings does not mean collaboration. As a matter of fact, meetings are generally the opposite of that. The more meetings your team has, the more their focus is destroyed. For the love of everything, please stop making everything a meeting and give people space to think through a problem and come up with some thoughtful input.

How do you manage prioritization and roadmapping?

This will vary between teams, but I like to keep it very simple. The inputs that I look at are:

 Do we have any numbers that point us towards the importance of certain things?

 Do we have any verbal/written feedback that points us towards the importance of certain things?

 Are there any specific movements that we see in the space that we need to make sure we are part of?

 Are there any new opportunities that are not yet understood/seen by others that we can be a part of?

Once you have reliable data on the above (and getting truly reliable data is hard and is what needs a lot of focus from product managers and their organizations), roadmapping and prioritization becomes easy, because one can clearly see where they can deliver the most value to the customers and the market. Whether it's then put in a JIRA board, or Trello, or whether story points are assigned to each item doesn't matter. The team needs to first understand the 

 Everything else comes from these insights.

These are not mutually exclusive. You can't rely just on data or just on intuition. It's always a combination, like I called out in the previous question. Anyone that relies exclusively on one or the other is going to either be lucky or wrong. Hard numbers rarely tell you 

 customers do what they do. Qualitative data coming from user studies only shows you a sample of your total potential customer base. Your intuition can be wrong more often than not because humans are terrible at identifying their own biases. So to mitigate risks, a product manager needs to take the approach where they look at multiple inputs, and then determine a path forward. This is where I am a HUGE proponent of experimentation, which I think is an area that can yield massive benefits to any team. Experimentation enables you to test hypotheses at scale. I'll frame this as an example — say that you are building a site where there is a sign-up flow, and you've noticed that a lot of people are dropping off right before they reach the last screen. Looking at just numbers, you see the drop-off — it doesn't tell you why. A data-savvy product manager or a data scientist might take this a step further and try to look at cohorts — where are the users that are dropping off coming from (e.g. mobile devices, a specific geographic region). This is still an incomplete story. Let's say that the next step is that the sign-up flow is passed through a user study. The product manager teams up with a researcher and they talk to seven people, all of whom went through the sign-up flow. The product manager and the researcher notice a pattern — the users struggle to identify which fields are optional and which are mandatory, and at some point they give up and quit. That's now the basis for a hypothesis — because the data is limited to seven people, it's hard to say if everyone is experiencing the same problem, but the PM intuition tells that 

 That is not concrete, undeniable evidence. So there are two options for the product manager now. They can go to the engineering team and talk about prioritizing field changes, to make it clearer which are optional and which are required, which would mean some form re-design. If they take this approach, they may solve the problem, or they may make it worse — who knows? Alternatively, the PM can set up an experiment, where they roll out changes to a limited audience to gauge the impact before making a decision.

Safari. I've been spending more time just reading things in the browser on my phone. Modern websites are really well optimized for mobile devices, and in a lot of cases have less negative privacy implications. Other than that, I am a big fan of 

 by Marco Arment. It's a delightful podcast manager.

What's the last book or podcast interview that totally wowed you?

Probably too many to name — I consider myself to be both an avid reader and a podcast listener, which means that my podcast feed is always overflowing and I have way too many books that I try to read at the same time. The latest book that I've read that really impressed me was 

 by Jessica Livingston. It's an older title (12 years now), but it goes into detail about how certain companies and products were started, and it's fascinating to see how creative founders got with technology that nowadays we take for granted. Truly, constraints breed resourcefulness. From the podcast side of things, I will call out 

 and its early episodes, where Alex Blumberg talks about creating Gimlet Media from scratch — it really shone a light on how a company is started from an idea to something that people love.

An interview with Den Delimarsky

So you’ve got a killer idea for a mobile app or tech product, and you want to build it. But… you don’t know much about design or development. And you're not sure how to launch without a technical cofounder. Sadly, lots of people give up right there. You really don’t have to, though.

One option: learn to build. Kevin Systrom, founder of Instagram, famously learned to code so he could build the first prototype himself. Cool story, bro. But you’ve probably got a day job and enough on your plate already, so chances are you don’t wanna go that route.

The other option: get some technical help. For most would-be founders without a technical background, this makes way more sense. It’s rare that one person has both the technical chops and the business acumen to ideate, design, build, launch and market a tech product . So if you’re the non-technical half of the equation, you've got two options. Either you can try to find a technical cofounder, or pay for development help.

If this is the fork in the road you find yourself at, this article is for you.

Here at Input Logic, we work with startup founders with all sorts of backgrounds. We’ve helped design and develop a ton of products that might never otherwise have seen the light of day. We’ve learned a thing or two along the way. For this piece, we also spoke with some non-technical founders who’ve actually launched startups. They share their words of wisdom, and advice they wish they’d known when getting started.

In short, there are five critical things you need to get right:

Bring on a senior technical hire when you’re ready

Input Output

An interview with Rishi Tripathy

This week's links:

App Store Optimization tips for your product launch

An interview with Andrew Yu

5 Reasons Why iOS Developers Need to Switch to SwiftUI

An interview with Paul Ortchanian

An interview with Den Delimarsky

How to get the most out of your branding sprint

An interview with Emma Townley-Smith

How to launch a startup without a technical cofounder

What I’ve Learned Building 4 React Native Apps Over 3 Years