Eric Jones

Super interesting thread with lots of insightful responses! Thanks Timothy! Here’s my 2 cents. Theme store themes are packaged and distributed for a merchant audience, not agency/developer audience. It’s compiled code. We don’t develop our themes that way, why should you? I build themes with well scoped theme components, Figma files, docs, CI, and workflows. All of these help us ship faster and at a higher quality. Why should you need to do these things yourself when they’ve already been solved or can be iterated from something that already exists? Themes are GIANT projects. Building a world class buying experience that checks all the boxes of quality and functionality from scratch just doesn’t make sense. If there was a design and development environment that gave you everything you needed, without limiting the final product you’re trying to deliver, why would you chose to not use it? If any of this resonates with you, you’re going to want to follow what we’re doing at Archetype Themes 👇 https://lnkd.in/ekQesRAD

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Interesting read for those of us in the web dev space. There are lots of exciting things happening with AI, but not all of them hit the mark just yet: "Right now, AI tools, especially in the context of UX design, are a solution in search of a problem. There are many problems and points of friction that cause UX designers to be inefficient and unproductive in their work, but working to develop solutions to those problems wouldn’t necessarily lead you to AI."

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Your product's positioning doesn't magically change when you talk about it differently....Or when you design a slide showing your logo relative to other logos in a market category you conveniently invented. This is "framing" not "positioning." Imagine if, long before D-Day, the leaders of Allied Nations started telling everyone they were the "leading armies in France and Germany" and showed maps of their tank divisions moving towards Berlin. Or if Meta started announcing that "Facebook's original app is now the leading social network for video among teenagers and the future of social media is here." ...and made a slide showing OG Facebook ahead of TikTok on an important strategic dimension. It would be nonsense. Positioning is a strategic reality. It consists of: 1. The position you have today. Where your company and product stands in an actual market category relative to every other company and product in that category. (If you have invented something truly new, this can be an emerging category that you get to name. Otherwise: have fun trying to convince the market that your project management software is actually "AI Workflow Automation Enablement") 2. The position you intend (and hope) to develop over the next "XYZ timeframe." Like Apple with the first version of the iPhone. If, in 2007, Steve Jobs said "iPhone is the leading smartphone in the world..." That would be delusional. Instead, Jobs and his team positioned the iPhone kinda like this: "we're gonna leverage our success with the iPod, our unique synthesis of hardware and software, and AT&T's weak position vis-a-vis Verizon to offer a completely new approach to smartphones and telecom business models.. We, instead of the carriers, get complete control over the interface and installed software, and carriers start selling data instead of call minutes. The interface will be so compelling that everyone...including Verizon...will eventually have to play by our rules. Then we'll expand across the market." If, after 4 years taking a break from the tech industry, doing intense spiritual work, volunteering at ashrams, studying esoteric forms of yoga, I said "I'm the go-to product marketing expert for visionary founders whose tech is ready to cross the chasm" I would be conflating positioning and framing... If, on the other hand, I say: I'm blending my product marketing skills in Series A-B B2B startups, my knack for articulating tech, market, and geopolitical trends years ahead of the curve...and mix in the "fractal" point of view I discovered deep inside my consciousness via traditional yoga and intense spiritual practice... And apply all of it to develop a position as the go-to product marketing expert for visionary founders... Then maybe I'd be onto something.

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we love to bash the shitty status quo of user assistance, but some products consistently get it right. one of the best parts on working on a UX-related company is you can justify spending a lot of time poking around other products in the name of learning. a lot are bad, but we try to help our customers get closer to the good ones. Loom is one of those should-be-copied products when it comes to in-product comms. on May 16 Finn Lobsien is going to break down what we think is copy-worthy in their onboarding flow. https://lnkd.in/g6_ddtPH

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Webflow is buying Intellimize and experimentation just got a lot more... Approachable for 1000s of marketing teams. Webflow was always missing an "easy" way to experiment. Yes, you could add 3rd party testing and experimentation tools BUT... You still had to rely on your engineers and developers to actually write code and implement an experiment. In a few months (hopefully) you would be able to do it all within the Webflow designer. They start out their announcement with: "Empowering the entire marketing team" Indeed. If you are a current customer of Webflow... Now would be the perfect time to start setting up your experimentation processes the right way. — — — P.S. “Experimentation Confidential | Off the Record” 👀

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Check out this blog post from my teammate Brandon Lin about how we migrated our mobile rendering codebase to use Typescript without disrupting developers!

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We've had an EM role open on our team for several months. This is a post about everything we learned from why we haven't filled it yet. I'd love to get your help in filling it! 🤝 The role: - EM for our 0-to-1 team within Postman, with the goal of defining and winning our category for a new kind of API-level monitoring/observability tool. Our team came into Postman through an acquisition and we're now building the Postman version of our product, using the same tech. - Help scale our product and team from alpha into beta. We are a department with six engineers and approved headcount to grow a lot more in the next year. - The role is 60% prioritization/roadmap management, 40% building the team. The current team members are high-ownership, independent, founding engineer types. 🤔 Misconceptions, miscalibrations, and lessons: - Initially, the role was called "Senior Engineering Manager, Observability." Instead of getting the product engineering managers we were looking for, we primarily got interest from platform/infra EMs. We got thousands of inbound applications and spent months zeroing that out. 🙀 - Previously, our recruiters were sourcing a lot of folks with observability backgrounds. We've learned that since we're actually building a new kind of observability product, much more focused on UX, the profile we're looking for is product-focused rather than tech-focused. No observability experience required. - When people think Postman, they often think of our core product: the API client. So we were getting more interest from folks looking to scale a product, rather than 0-to-1 "I want to build a team and product" types. Postman actually has several other products, for instance testing and Flows, our no-code tool. There is a lot of interesting 0-to-1 work on our way to growing as a multi-product platform! - Some people have the perception that Postman isn't one of the high-growth companies because they're not seeing lots of their friends joining Postman. Postman has quadrupled since 2020, BUT a lot of the engineering growth has been in India. (Postman is the biggest SaaS company to come out of India!) Our team is part of a recent change to grow our US engineering presence. Many of us leaders across the company are looking for folks to join early cohorts of US-based product engineering and platform teams. 💡 What we've changed on our end: - We've deemphasized the "observability" part of the job and emphasized the "new product" and "product engineering" parts of the job. - We've also switched our own reachouts to look for people with product engineering experience at SaaS companies with product-led growth. 👩‍🚀 Help us find our EM! We now have a solid pipeline, but haven't yet made a hire. We'd love to hear from you if: - You have thoughts about how to improve our EM search. - You know someone we should meet. - You're a scrappy EM looking for an opportunity to build a new product while growing a team. Look forward to hearing from you!

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This will sound "duh" but a lot of new DTC brands don't realize it until it's too late. Invest in really good photography. The difference between a forgettable eCommerce site and one that gets the order (besides a good story, good marketing copy, and social proof) can come down to the quality of the creative assets. In a world of a million knock-offs and shoddy products, showing high-quality photographs of your actual product in the hands of real people in a genuine setting: big difference. We've never had a situation where we've had too many great photographs. The more the merrier. If you're a DTC Brand CEO looking to boost your revenue, then grab 'The 5 Ways High-Performing DTC Brands Get 10-20% eCommerce Conversion Rates'. This guide reveals the 5 tactics that the highest-performing DTC brands employ daily to achieve 10-20%+ conversion rates on their eCommerce websites. Note: If you don't see my comment below with the link, choose 'Recent Comments' in the dropdown below my post.

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This might be a hot take, but my position is that the obsession with mass creative testing in ecommerce is misguided. So you're telling me...we're supposed to just keep throwing asset after asset into an ad account and keep our fingers crossed, hoping for the best? Ad platforms like Meta or TikTok are a black box. Nailing 1 asset out of 10 tries is deemed a 'success.' And to me, running a creative strategy this way feels wasteful. More and more, marketers and creative strategists are being tasked with jumping on a creative treadmill and never coming off of it. I don't know. Maybe I'm off base here...but curious to hear what you think. What's your take on the state of creative testing for DTC brands? PS: I'll be sharing more of my thoughts on this, and how we think about scaling ad accounts at Proxima in future posts.

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WOMEN TAKE CHARGE.  Literally.  And to see all these powerhouse women together, taking CHARGE is amazing. 🤩 I'm excited to see a jam-packed Charge: The Revenue Summit schedule highlighting fierce women in revenue. Join us to learn from these trailblazers on how to stop revenue leak, design and run proper revenue cadences, and develop a robust AI strategy to capture more revenue. You’ll hear from powerhouses like: - Rachel Roberts (CRO, AppDynamics)- Jaclyn Spillane (Director of Innovation PMO, Genesys)- Sonal Puri (VP of Global Business Operations, Checkpoint)- Michelle Ji-Yeun Kim (Director Sales Strategy & Ops, Zendesk)- Molly Greenberg (Head of GTM Transformation, Asana) - and more!RSVP to answer the most critical question in revenue: Will you meet, beat or miss on revenue?Grab your seat here: https://lnkd.in/gSFresfF 

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Like many the folks at Knapsack, I was pretty excited to see what Figma was going to announce today regarding design systems connectivity. There is a lot to be stoked about with typography, component metadata, etc. and a lot of great moments (I'm not just talking about the elevator music that was🔥) However, I keep wondering how much engineers (and their managers) are going to be willing to commit to including and maintaining extra code in their repository to be able to them see it presented back to them in Figma. It is an odd cycle. Take a design of a component from Figma, build some code, add specific code to allow you to connect it back to Figma... all to see the thing you built in Figma? This feels like swimming upstream? (obligatory salmon pic attached) Wouldn't it make more sense to just gather data from Figma and put it in the place developers already work? Would love to understand what you all make of this, especially dev voices.

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Hot Take: Webflow is overhyped (Wordpress is still MVP) Now, before the Webflow fans come at me with pitchforks, hear me out! At Takeoff we work with both CMS's. I have no agenda here. But for 90% of our clients (growth-stage startups), WordPress is the clear winner. Why? Because the marketers I speak with every week have ONE primary concern: "We need the ability to easily add new sections to pages or build new landing pages without a developer" With Webflow: -you can do it but the backend UI can quickly overwhelm a non-technical marketer. -If you want to publish your new landing page but you are mid-editing a new blog post, you can't publish the landing page without also publishing that blog post that's not ready. -Since Webflow only has 2 user roles - you're either an "editor" and can change page text but can't make any layout changes OR a "designer" that can easily break the page experience with a few wrong clicks. In Wordpress: -you can drag'n'drop any of the 20 or so custom blocks we designed for you to build a new page. Each block has useful variants that can accommodate the content you're adding. -Impossible to break something or mess up the page design. -You can control which user has access to which sections of the website and publish only the pages you are ready to share. Are there situations when we recommend Webflow? Definitely... Typically either: -for an earlier stage startup with a marketing team of 1, considering they will barely be touching the website for a while. -a company that has someone with design and/or dev chops on their marketing team that's comfortable with the power to change everything that Webflow provides. But 9/10 times Wordpress takes the cake 🎂 and that's why our SaaS clients like ServiceTrade, Bluecore, and SupplierGateway prefer it. ----------👇 I'm the CMO at Takeoff and we believe “A company’s website should fuel its growth 🚀."  ‘Follow’ me for insights into how we're helping SaaS brands grow. 🚀🚀🚀

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5 reasons why you should apply for the UX/UI Designer role at Jackrabbit Technologies on the Jackrabbit Class Product team: 1. People 👥 —This company has some of the best people you'll ever meet or work with. 2. Culture & Values ✨ —We live, breathe, and commit to the values that drive our strong culture. 3. Product 🐰 —Our product has been in the market for 20 years! Its impact on youth activity centers is fascinating. I bet you know someone who's used our parent portal ;) 4. Opportunity 🗞️ —our product team allows you to be curious, grow, and find opportunities professionally and personally through our users, peers, and the industries we serve. 5. Impact 🚀 —Our team thrives on the outcomes our product achieves daily for our users and clients.

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Another example of how Knapsack helps teams go from design to code quickly and efficiently to deliver real value to the product teams that use your design system. So many folks are focused on documentation being the way to connect design and code (and docs do matter), but having a structured, codified, version controlled way to specifically define how you connect Figma to a coded component is really what helps us deliver value to product teams that use the design system.

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Pretty exciting working on side-projects to collab with other well-respected tech vendors to bring something new to their customer base. It's something I've got to do a lot more of since running the product at Webtrends Optimize. We've always had a "best in class" and "stronger together" mentality. A lot of people during the demo/sales process ask us questions like "do you do session recording and heatmaps" or "where can I store my insights?". My answers are always quite simple. We partner with people who've spent the entirety of their business being awesome at session recording, like Fullstory, ContentSquare, Clarity, etc. - why would we build something like 0.1% of our engineering time and expect it to be any good? Instead, it's far better for everyone to put our data in that platform, and to analyse it using something that's best-in-class. For the same reason that most people say any CMS, CDP or Personalisation vendor trying to "do testing" is usually awful, us trying to be a CDP would be just as bad. So we don't (much). Best in class, best of breed, best for the job - whatever you call it, that's the stack we endorse.

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Our team consumed 20+ $1 hot dogs at the Texas Rangers game last night. Here’s what it taught me about scaling Shopify brands. 1. Know your customer - Get deeply specific on the customer you are going after. 2. Structure strong direct-response offers. 3. Spend more time on strategy and creative, less time in ad accounts. 4. Funnel consistency - Creative, to landing page to backend emails must have consistent messaging. 5. Know your numbers - track daily metrics, understand front-end profitably and longterm profitability. #shopify #ecommerce #hotdoglearnings

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Hey folks.. I've been lurking without contributing for a while now. ComplyAuto (the company I work for) took us all to a retreat in Park City Utah a few weeks ago. It was awesome to meet my team in person. During the retreat we had a discussion about building a vision for the future of the business. One thing really stuck to me during the conversation. The presenter quoted an old Nike campaign, that went something like this: “All champions are born. Then they’re broken. We rebuild champions.” I tried (and failed) to find this quote but I like it regardless for a few reasons. It means anyone can be a champion. If we are all born champions, then it means we all have unlimited potential.   This also means your teammates, spouses, children, friends and family are champions too. They have this unlimited potential to do anything they set their minds to. It’s intimidating to think how powerful this idea is! We need to encourage growth in ourselves and in our peers. A rising tide lifts all boats right? If you can help catalyze growth in one person, imagine the ripple effect as you see everyone like this. It also has a dark side—we’re broken at some point. A coach doesn’t believe in us and cuts us from the team. A teacher in school says we’re not very smart. We think we're the perfect fit for a job and then get a cold corporate rejection email. Kids pick on you and it gets to you. You might have had an abusive parent.. life is rough. We’ve all been broken and we desperately need people to believe in us. I invite you to believe in your peers, friends and family. They’re champions—believe it! They just need to hear from you that you think they’re incredible and can do anything, because they can, because YOU believe they can.  -- That's one of my big beliefs and rules in life—think of everyone as a champion. What's a life rule you live by? #personal #motivation #potential #growth #personalGrowth

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Do you think its possible to design with emotion through AI? Excited to have Chris Willis join us this year at the Front: a UX & Product community conference to share in what ways Domo is using AI to leverage AI to humanize problems and improve the product through design. Find out more about what he'll speak about here... https://lnkd.in/gPKuYYmS #design #ai #emotion #frontutah

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Normally I'm a huge, huge fan of John Cutler and his newsletter, which you *should* subscribe to if you want to learn how to be an effective dev or PM. However, his missive yesterday is off the mark. What he's observing is 100% a failure of leadership. People can blame the tools all they want, but if you're not creating a culture that supports these principles they go nowhere. https://lnkd.in/gdCg3-VR #PMI #softwaredevelopment #productmanagement #agile

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