Three Great Reads (3/19/2025)

Review mining, competitive moats, and do we need PMs?

The Lazy PM's Guide to Customer Research: "Review Mining" Will Save Your Ass (Justin Williams)
First off, don’t stop talking to your customers. But…sometimes you can’t talk to as many customers as you want or need. This is where “review mining” might be a good adjunct to your existing discovery process. This article is funny, profane, and very concrete, and by the end, you’ll know exactly how to mine your product reviews for quality insights. About 4 minutes. (link)

The Product Engineer: Who builds the product? (Michael Lopp)
“[Y]ou don’t need Product Managers.” For folks who don’t know, the author is the engineering leader’s engineering leader. He’s written three best-selling books about software engineering and engineering leadership and has been VP of Engineering at Apple, Slack, Pinterest, Palantir, Netscape, and more. He runs the biggest and best community for tech leadership: Rands Leadership Slack. And to be honest, I don’t think he’s wrong - the fact that most companies do need product managers says more about the company (and the limitations of their engineers and engineering culture) as it does about our profession. Give it a read. About 6 minutes. (link)

Revisiting Competitive Moats (Kyle Harrison)
The strategic notion of a moat is getting it from both sides, thanks to Gen AI. On the one hand, we’re approaching a moment when each user and company gets to build its own customer software for free. On the other hand, the frontier LLMs, which have been sucking up so much CapEx themselves, seem to be susceptible to low-cost challengers. The author uses his perspective as an investor to argue that technology moats have always been ephemeral and suggest product velocity (towards what?) as a better predictor of positioning defensibility. (link)