Tim Stephens

A (not so) quick update on Propane Patrol: A few weeks ago, I quietly launched Propane Patrol, an app to help RVers find propane refill locations along with prices (something not offered by any other product). I initially launched Propane Patrol as a subscription-only app, but charging RVers every month just felt like the wrong direction. Functionally, the app is a two-sided marketplace with an initial injection of seller data to help overcome the typical cold start problem. While the app helps solve a need for RV propane consumers, the refiller businesses all benefit monetarily through increased consumer awareness. It seemed logical to first charge those who benefit monetarily, while allowing the consumer base to (ideally) snowball while Propane Patrol builds a positive brand as a free and useful resource. More users means more word of mouth along with more user-reported locations and prices. No self-imposed limits on growth. So I flipped the switch. I removed the consumer paywall just a week into launch. With that step taken, the new reality is that I’ve spent 4 months (~2 days per week) on an MVP that now earns zero dollars, and a business model that was validated for the consumer side but only tangentially validated on the seller/refiller side through a single phone call. With that step, I’ve essentially restarted the MVP development process. The current app is a base for the next phase where I hopefully build out some customer acquisition solutions for refillers. There’s some opportunity for partnerships to help bring in some initial funding, and having a real app with real potential propane customers is definitely not a bad place to start. While the SaaS space is a little quiet on the far edge of the RV consumer space, there is a lot more tech activity further up the chain in propane distribution and resale. I may end up making a bigger play in that direction. I spent some late nights this past week running some data extraction for propane businesses across what I’ve determined to be the top 2,000 towns and cities for RVers, generating a data set of ~5,700 business locations with ~17,000 Google Maps user reviews to help shed light on specific services offered. I ran all data through an LLM to apply tags to each location (costing me an entire $10 on GPT-4o tokens), and further analysis will hopefully help me gauge opportunities and next steps in the propane service industry. If anything, this whole exercise has been a great experience in exploring an industry. I’m excited to see where this data takes me. To close out this post: I had the first refill business contact me directly today. An independent hardware store in Mustang, OK, found out about Propane Patrol from a customer (!!), and asked how to get listed on the app as a propane refiller. It was one of those encouraging moments that made me feel like I’m actually adding value to the world through my app, even if I personally still have a lot to figure out.

26

2 Comments

Are You Trapped in the "Get Sh*t Done" Cycle as a PM? If you're a "get-sh*t-done" product manager, I know your reality all too well. You're drowning in a relentless deluge of tactical tasks and endless fires. Meetings and minutiae are your constant companions. Meanwhile, the game-changing strategic initiatives that could propel your company and career get shelved. An afterthought amidst the mayhem. Here's the bitter truth: "Get-sh*t-done" PMs like you aren't promoted or properly rewarded. You stay underpaid, overworked, and easily replaceable. An expendable cog allowing others to rise. If that harsh reality sounds far too familiar, it's time to make a change. It's time to strategically position yourself as a product leader - both inside your company and to the external world. When you embody leadership from the inside-out, you forge an unforgettable personal brand. One that commands attention and amplifies your influence. You become the beacon others naturally gravitate towards when new teams need building, ambiguous issues need solving, or conflicts need resolving. No more saying "yes" to everything only to get buried. No more fruitlessly swinging away at people problems and organizational politics. You operate from a place of calm confidence, deftly navigating any challenge with poise. This mindset shift unlocks unshakable self-assuredness. You create the headspace for contentment, fulfillment, and joy. There's finally room to live life again - treasured family time, hobbies, new experiences (maybe even that Tesla?). And of course, respected leadership commands the financial rewards you deserve. Funding your kids' college and retirement becomes straightforward, not pipe dreams. But transformations like this don't happen through sheer grit alone. You need coaching from a world-class team armed with comprehensive frameworks. That's why I'm urging you to book a call with my team if you're ready to escape the "get sh*t done" trap for good. We'll equip you with the tools to shatter your glass ceiling and become the revered product leader you were born to become. No more getting things done. No more going underappreciated and underpaid. Just a clear path to sustainable career fulfillment as an elite product leader. If you are interested, please DM me "GSD" You already have everything you need to be an inspiring product leader - you just need the right guides to unlock your potential. If you're ready to level up, book your call now.

21

3 Comments

The best teams I've worked with have removed all friction to deploy and release software. Let me know if this sounds familiar: - Your team does not release on a Friday - Your team needs someone's approval to deploy - You can't show this new feature to a customer because it's on DEV - You can't play around with this new feature if you don't know how to run it yourself on your machine I've recently helped a fractional CTO friend do an audit on a startup. Their deployment process required approval and manually transferring files via FTP and restart the server. This is nothing to be ashamed of, but it can severely impact your ability to move fast! Obviously, they didn't release very often. Making it easy to deploy is not simple and the gains are perhaps unintuitive. The ideal goal would be to deploy automatically every time code changes. This also means deploying work in progress on feature branches. As you get there, results start showing up: 1. Code quality goes up 2. New work gets to users daily 3. Feedback is consequently faster 4. Deploying stops being someone's burden 5. Issues can be quickly fixed by deploying again, faster 6. Ability to experiment, validate with real users and discard prototypes 7. New changes can be demoed or tested before they land on the main branch Is there a reason why you're not doing it yet?

22

24 Comments

If you’re building a 0-to-1 product, I cannot stress how important it is to maintain a History Log of all changes you make along the way. Changed a copy? Log it. Launched something? Log it. Invaluable in debugging longitudinal metric fluctuations.

237

15 Comments

Say what you want about Superhuman, I open it multiple times a day for this single feature -> creating a meeting with time zone conversion. Every other calendar product I've tried is so bad at this that I will open superhuman just to schedule an event. Why is this UX so effective? - Robust natural language interpretation makes it 10x faster to use than a form - Handles time zone conversion seamlessly - Combines natural language input with a structured feedback UI - it doesn't talk back to me! That last part is essential and I think winning LLM applications will forego a simple chat interface for something with more structured outputs and actions. The old adage for good system design is to be liberal with what you accept and conservative about what you return. Rarely do I want just a stream of text in response. I have plenty of rambling thoughts to input into text boxes, the value I see is having those rambling inputs converted into concrete and deterministic actions.

51

7 Comments

There are only 2 spots left for the Icademy For Climate Vol. 1: Find program starting on July 1! 😮 You're a good fit for this program if: * you have a job (or work as a consultant) * you have an idea to help solve the climate crisis that could be a business * you've never created a business before This program gives you everything you need to transform your idea into a validated business plan: 🥾 One-on-one guidance from an experienced ClimateTech founder (me!) 👏 Weekly group coaching sessions with a small group of peers 🎥 Live workshops to teach you how to complete startup best practices 🙋🏽‍♀️ Always-on community of 40+ mentors, experts, and entrepreneurs devoted to helping you succeed Have questions? Just reply or message me! 👋🏼 Link to more info in the comments 👇

5

1 Comment

I’m frequently asked about our tech stack at Mosaic.. which is awesome because it gives me an excuse to write a nerdy LinkedIn post about it! As a tech-enabled GC, we have a very cross-functional team of designers and full stack engineers. Our real secret sauce (and the challenge of any full stack / tech-enabled business) is how operations and technology collaborate. This has a much greater impact than our tech stack, but for those curious - here it is! :-)  TypeScript React NextJS tRPC Tailwind Postgres AWS (Lambda, RDS, S3, ECS, Cloudfront) SST If you’re in software or con-tech (and interested in learning more), let me know and I can share more about how we’re using them. Or, if you’re tracking other softwares relevant to the construction or real estate industry, feel free to drop them in the comments below. I’d love to see the industry do more technology sharing!

42

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

2

Product management has caught my eye and I’d love to connect with anyone 1:1 who’s able to share their thoughts on the profession and their personal experience within their company (or former employers). Many thanks in advance! ♥️ #productmanagement #productmanager

20

13 Comments

How to ruthlessly prioritize as a "design team of one" (with real examples) When you're the only designer, everyone’s ask is top priority: - PM requests are piling up - UX is riddled with inconsistencies - Stakeholders have big, new ideas - Sales needs our help demonstrating their promises The biggest challenge isn't the design work itself. It's knowing what to work on, and what to postpone. I don’t love “frameworks”, but I worked with a world-class VP of Product who taught me the LNO framework - and it’s clutch. L - Losing deals/revenue N - Noticeable issues O - Optimization opportunities Real world examples from my "team of 1" days: 1. Losing revenue - Enterprise customer threatening to churn - Outdated pricing page hurting conversions - Confusing checkout flow = abandoned carts I drop everything to tackle issues actively costing us $$. 2. Noticeable issues - Inconsistent button styles - Lack of empty states - Janky mobile experience These hurt, but won't tank the business overnight. I capture them in a backlog and prioritize the quick fixes. 3. Optimizations - Illustration explorations - Nice-to-have micro-interactions - "Wouldn't it be cool if..." ideas I say no (for now). Optimizations come last when you're a team of one. The "everything is important" mentality will burn you out. Embrace the mess. Focus relentlessly on revenue. Build your backlog for later. And then there’s the point on how to communicate “no”. I’ll touch on this soon.

286

24 Comments

Product Rockstars in tech....It's not about strategy. It's not about frameworks. To play big...it's about the soft skills. Yep....your EQ is critical to level up and lead. You need to master the human side of work.  Treating people with respect Understanding how to communicate Executive presence Managing politics (yep...,I said it) Treating people as human beings To level up in the world of tech....it's about the human game. #productmanagement #techleaders #womenintech Are you ready to level up into leadership? Are you ready to learn how to play the human game? Respond with 'yes' and I'll send you my E-Book on The Next Generation of Leadership in Product

1

Attention all founders: if I can unplug, you can too. Here’s a crazy stat we pulled from the FERMÀT Slack that puts into perspective how “always-on” it can get: I send 30% more Slack messages than the 2nd highest poster org-wide.  And my response time is the fastest in the company. This isn’t meant to be a flex – in fact, some may find it concerning 😅 I’m by no means great at disconnecting, but I’ve found the balance that works. And that’s all you really need… Here’s my MO: ➝ If you’re trying to reach me on a Friday night or Saturday – good luck. That time is completely prioritized for family and friends, giving me a much-needed recharge and emotional uplift before getting ahead on Sundays. ➝ If I’m in the gym, I’m not responding. If I'm on the squat rack, I simply can’t be thinking about sales strategies or the next experiment we'll run. On top of the health benefits, the gym, or any sport, completely takes me out of any other mental space. Don’t just view these asides as tasks – consider them strategic choices that encourage you to put down your phone every once in a while. What do you do to unplug? 

38

15 Comments

A unicorn founder told me recently that Staff/Principal Engineers who have stayed at the same company for 5+ years are a bad fit for early-stage start-ups. I tend to agree with them. Their explanation was the longer an engineer stays, the more they may depend on the “scaffolding” that surrounds them. It’s a bell curve... they start strong, reach a high point of creativity, and then slowly start focusing more on upkeep instead of new ideas. The best move is to prioritize folks who are dealing with challenges and adaptability over titles/years of exp. because if you’re not moving forward, you’re falling behind.

24

16 Comments

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!

67

8 Comments

We'll start doing Continuous Discovery next quarter. We need the right tools, the right setup. We might hire a UXR. Putting it off will make product discovery look harder and harder to do. Doing tiny steps today will make it look more approachable. That's why I stand behind the mantra "Just talk to users". You can worry about refining hypothesis, sample size and user cohorts later. So I'd urge you to talk to ONE user this week. Even without a plan. Just to get your feet wet. Just to do some form of product discovery at all. And if you are doing that already, then great: You are ready to dive into doing product discovery right. -------- I post 5x a week here in an attempt to get 1000 companies to iterate weekly. I'm at 15/1000. Which is one more than a two weeks ago. Follow along to see if I make it before turning 90 - and shoot me a message if you need a little help to get your Discovery rolling. #productmanagement #productdiscovery #uxresearch

12

6 Comments

Over the last 8+ years, I’ve helped grow multiple startups across different verticals - each with completely different performance review systems. Some are political and opaque, and others are * refreshingly * transparent. We’re building Seam to help rewrite the playbook for performance reviews. Here’s a quick breakdown of our strategy: 1) Simplifying performance management Seam does away with the old system in favor of real-time data and transparency. It’s a breath of fresh air for everyone. 2) Removing guessing games With Seam, managers can analyze employee progress (or areas of improvement) in real-time — no more guesswork when evaluating performance. 3) Improving transparency (for everyone) It’s not just managers who benefit. Employees get to see their performance metrics — fostering healthy competition and promoting productivity. Performance management today is broken - we’re building Seam to fix it ⚡ https://lnkd.in/grBNi7ee

52

4 Comments

"Why doesn't my boss notice the work I'm doing?" Recognition is a keystone for product managers looking to move forward in their career. Today, we help someone who's feeling overlooked by their manager. If you have a question about product management, shoot me a DM. ✉️ I'm here to help! #productmanagement #productmanagers #careeradvice #askaquestion #askmeanything

4

Seeing reviews like this makes my day: "Propel yourself ahead of your competition with PropelAuth" When I started PropelAuth, my vision was to get auth off of developer's plates so they could launch their products faster. Since then, it's become so much more than that - we've added tools that make it easier not only to launch, but also to run and grow your business. We want companies that use PropelAuth to be able to surpass their competition in every dimension, not just by having a prettier sign up experience... and based on reviews like the one above, we're on our way!

25

4 Comments

23 years after the Manifesto for Agile Software Development was published, and nearly 40 years after Boehm proposed his Spiral Model for software development, many dev teams who've embraced the idea of delivering software iteratively and incrementally are still locked in the hell of Big Design Up-Front and fixed scopes, imposed on them by the wider organisation in the form of UX design ("Big UX Design Up-Front" or BUXDUF). Somebody who's typically not part of the dev team defines the user experience and UI designs, often before devs even get involved, and these designs are presented to the team as a fait accompli, with the customer expectation that they'll get everything in that design, and in a timescale the devs were also not involved in agreeing. There are some major disadvantages to this approach: * BUXDUF's done when we know the least about the problem * BUXDUF specs very often leave many questions unanswered about e.g., system behaviour * BUXDUF is alarmingly often not driven by actual use cases - it's like building the sets and *then* writing the script. * BUXDUF defines the complexity of the system, without any input from the people building it. It's tempting to cram our proverbial rucksack with everything plus the kitchen sink when we know someone else will be carrying it. But humans are funny old things; once a solution's been proposed, we have a hard time letting go of it. So BUXDUF also often has the effect of locking in the design, with customers, designers and teams being reluctant to change it even when that's the simplest way to solve a problem. And because UX designers are often not part of the dev team, having moved on to some other application after handing over their BUXDUF, that bottleneck increases the incentive for users to take what they're given and damn well like it. I've seen many times teams trying to make the problem fit their solution, arguing with users that that's what they *really* need. But when we do the design up-front when we know the least, it's very rarely what they actually need. Instead of BUXDUF, what works much better is when UX design is tackled as a *continuous* *shared* activity embedded in an iterative development process, defining and evolving the UX design as requirements come into focus, and adapting to user feedback with every user-testable build. As with any software architecture - and UX *is* software architecture - this requires team to be continually thinking about UX design, continuously testing it, and continuously refactoring it to improve the user's experience. And it's *everybody's* concern. https://lnkd.in/e8gHYpS2

21

6 Comments