The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Engineering management / careers

Building Customer Driven SaaS Products

jasonevanish.com

Posts with strategies and tactics on building great products and how to be a better leader

Engineering management / careersSoftware / engineering practice

’10’15’20’25
Posts
180 from 24 Sep 2009 to 18 Feb 2026
Posting
now and then (2 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
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https://jasonevanish.com/feed/

2026 1

  1. The SaaS Reset: Why SaaS is changing, not going away.

2025 8

  1. How to Use AI for Product Management: Leverage AI to move faster and get better results
  2. Why Your Team is Struggling with AI Adoption (and what to do about it)
  3. “Not our biggest problem.” A painful startup lesson.
  4. Clever, Helpful, or Beautiful: My 7 Favorite Website Feedback Widgets
  5. When it comes to AI, the Square Root of Slop…is Slop.
  6. Why Customer Support Shouldn’t Handle Your Product Feedback
  7. 5 Harsh Truths of Customer Feedback that hold Products Back
  8. The Affordable Healthcare Alternative Every Founder Should Know About

2024 3

  1. How to Structure (and get the most out of) Your Customer Development Interviews
  2. How to Write a Product Thesis: A Product Spec Your Engineering & Design Teams will Actually Read
  3. How Product Managers can help their Engineers make Better Estimates

2023 9

  1. How to Write Product Updates that Delight Customers & Reduce Churn
  2. Steven Sinofsky’s Guide to Customer Product Updates
  3. 10 Rules of SaaS that will make your startup journey easier
  4. The Hierarchy of Startup Business Value: Is Your Product a Valuable Business?
  5. Small tweaks, Big Differences: Lowering your flake rate on customer interviews
  6. A Simple, Fun Way to Develop Your Product Manager’s Eye for Design
  7. How to Take Notes like a Pro during Your Customer Interviews to Maximize Learning
  8. 10 Things I Hate About ConvertKit
  9. Practical Product Ep 11: JTBD (Jobs to Be Done) – What it is, why it matters, how to use it, and a real life example

2022 10

  1. Practical Product Ep 10: ChatGPT and AI: The latest applications and what they mean for PMs feat Lazar Stojkovic
  2. Practical Product Ep 9: The Harsh Truth of Interviewing & Hiring Product Managers
  3. Practical Product Ep 8: How to Write Product Specs Your Team & Executives Actually Want to Read
  4. Practical Product Ep 7: How to Supercharge Growth with Free Tools & Side Products with Michael Novotny
  5. Practical Product Ep 6: Succeeding as a Remote Product Leader w/ Valentina Thörner, Product Advisory at Klaus
  6. Practical Product Ep 5: Why intellectuals are wrong about AI, the Bundling Phase & What it means for PMs, and more.
  7. Practical Product Ep 4: The Curse of the 1st PM – Part 2: The PM View with 4-time 1st PM, Hostos Monegro
  8. Practical Product Ep 3: The Curse of the 1st PM – Part 1: The Company View with Pulkit Agrawal of Chameleon
  9. Practical Product Ep 2: The “Impossible” Product Manager w/ Jason Cohen of A Smart Bear + WP Engine
  10. Introducing the Practical Product Podcast

2021 4

  1. How PMs can Master Stakeholder Management to Build Better Products & Win Together
  2. 10 Things I Love About Superhuman
  3. Why Feature Voting Creates Poor Products (and what to do instead)
  4. How Being Customer Driven United a Startup & Doubled Feature Engagement

2020 2

  1. Slaying Churn Monsters: 5 ways to reduce churn better than an exit survey
  2. 100 Lessons and Spicy Takes on Being a Software Product Manager

2019 3

  1. The Two Most Important Words for Product Managers to Use
  2. Calming the Angry Elephant: How to Communicate with Customers During a Product Crisis
  3. Why You Want to be the *Second* 1st PM

2015 1

  1. Peer 1-1s: The Missing Habit Separating Good and Great Product Managers

2014 20

  1. To New Beginnings: TCN Acquires Greenhorn Connect
  2. Why don’t we reward good managers?
  3. Why you should think of your employees as Allies in the future of work
  4. Why Replacing a Good Employee Will Cost you $65,510
  5. What to Expect When You Start Having 1 on 1s
  6. Do You Believe in Your Team?
  7. 10 Common Ways to Lose Good Employees
  8. 10 Critical Mistakes You Could Be Making in Your 1 on 1s
  9. 101 Questions to Ask in One on Ones
  10. 21 Reasons You Should Start Having One on Ones with Your Team
  11. 3 Keys to Starting to do 1 on 1s with Your Team
  12. How to make your team love you for less than $10
  13. What Viktor Frankl can teach us about managing teams
  14. The most important word for motivating your team
  15. How to do a Jobs To Be Done Interview
  16. A Guide to Finding Your Meaning of Life
  17. The 5 Harsh Truths of Being a Manager
  18. The 2 Most Important Skills to Start Your Career
  19. Why are there so many bad managers?
  20. Why you should read 100 books

2013 21

  1. What the Stratasys patent suit of Afinia means for the 3D Printing Industry
  2. The Rise of the 3rd Party Manufacturer in 3D Printing
  3. Why the Mayday button is another genius move by Bezos and Amazon
  4. Why Consumer 3D Printing Companies Should Think Twice About Fundraising
  5. What the Kickstarter Hangover will do to the 3D Printing Industry
  6. Consequences of the New Wave of Consumer 3D Printing
  7. Why Netflix should buy AMC
  8. 3 Books Every Investor Should Read
  9. How 3D Printing Companies are using Kickstarter to Accelerate the 3D Revolution
  10. Consumer 3D Printing has a Twitter Problem
  11. 95 Ways to find your first customers for customer development or your first sale
  12. Why Travis Kalanick is going to be a Transportation Rockefeller
  13. The Unscientific Causes and Cure to Burnout
  14. Do you really read?
  15. Founders: You don’t own your employees
  16. Building a network is about playing the long game
  17. How to Become a Better Leader Instantly
  18. The Lean Startup Movement’s Guidebook: The Lean Entrepreneur
  19. Make things better than you found them
  20. 25 Things I wish I knew before moving to San Francisco
  21. Lessons in Innovation from the Biographer of Jobs, Einstein & Franklin

2012 21

  1. The secret weapon to bringing change to your life: Simple Triggers & Routines
  2. My Philosophy on Reading Books
  3. Why you should take your 20s seriously
  4. The Fallacy of Chasing Startup Ideas
  5. Great Chefs and Great Entrepreneurs
  6. Should founders care about their employees’s personal lives?
  7. SF Startup Survival Guide: How to help your employee move to San Francisco
  8. 11 Books Every Entrepreneur Should Read
  9. How to Plan for Succession in Your Business
  10. SF Startup Survival Guide: How to Find an Apartment in San Francisco
  11. The Secret to Getting Any Job You Want: Focus
  12. Connecting the Dots: How a Boston Connector Landed at an SF Startup
  13. Boston, I need your help!
  14. Dear Boston…
  15. Is Wentworth more entrepreneurial than Harvard and all of the UMass schools combined?
  16. The Concept – Product Chasm: The End of my Lean Product Management Tool & Rediscovery of Passion’s Importance
  17. Leadership Lessons in Real Life: Leading by Example
  18. How Do You Get Back on the Customer Development Horse?
  19. Lessons Learned in Customer Development
  20. 5 Lessons Learned in a Lean Startup
  21. Don’t build that feature! How to use the 5 Why’s to learn what your customer really is saying

2011 27

  1. West Coast Differences – Non Startup Edition
  2. Visiting the Valley Next Week
  3. The Lean Product Life Cycle
  4. Using Customer Development on the Customer Development Process
  5. Continuous Deployment: Possibility or Pipe Dream?
  6. Lessons learned in getting press
  7. Does Boston Have Too Many Startups? A response to Kirsner’s Sunday Globe Article
  8. 3 Questions Brought About by Steve Jobs’s Life
  9. Why I’m Starting a Company Now
  10. Fall Accelerator in Boston?
  11. Independence Day & Quicksand
  12. Motivation and Perspective
  13. Competition and Inspiration: Environmental Effects of Nantucket and Beyond
  14. My thoughts on #BetterMA: How to Retain Gen Y
  15. Leadership Lessons First Time Entrepreneurs Forget
  16. Torture and Culture
  17. Why Unlimited Vacation is a Bad Idea for Startups
  18. Leadership Lessons from Pixar
  19. A few added thoughts for the Globe piece today…
  20. Every new beginning is some other beginning’s end: Moving on from oneforty
  21. Why the Peekaboo Mobile Acquisition is Huge for Boston
  22. A frank discussion on the best place to build your startup as a young entrepreneur…
  23. What iPhone apps do I *have to have*?
  24. Yes…I finally have a SmartPhone and it’s an iPhone.
  25. Lessons Learned from Observing the OnSwipe Investment Announcement
  26. New Year’s Resolutions
  27. American Holidays: Most Underrated, Most Overrated and Ignored

2010 20

  1. Some stats on the DevelopersDevelopersDevelopersDevelopers Event
  2. The Social Network – Review, etc…
  3. Do you have an inner Pit Bull?
  4. The smart phone decision: an unexpected choice
  5. Life I chose or the life that chose me…
  6. Greenhorn Needs a Phone!!! Help!
  7. Book Review: 10 Powerful Personas By Kevin Vogelsang
  8. Book Review: Mastering the VC Game by Jeff Bussgang
  9. Why Barnes & Noble is going to go out of business and I don’t mind…
  10. Book Review: Founders at Work
  11. Learning: Amassing Knowledge vs. Creating Understanding
  12. GreenhornConnect – DartBoston #FlashParty Entrepreneur Meetup Recap
  13. Why you may not want to talk to panelists after events…
  14. Naming is so (not) Important
  15. New Year’s Resolutions Check Up
  16. It’s a Black and Blue and Gray World…
  17. Book Review: Gary V’s Crush It
  18. Book Review: Chris Brogan’s Trust Agents
  19. Business Card Etiquette
  20. 8 Resolutions in 2010

2009 30

  1. Startup Weekend Report: Friday
  2. The Young Entrepreneur’s Guide, Part V: Making it Official
  3. GreenhornTV has moved…to www.GreenhornConnect.com
  4. Lessons Learned: Under Promise, Over Deliver
  5. GreenhornTV Episode 2: Global Entrepreneurship Week
  6. 21 Tweets for UltraLight Startups: Leveraging Social Media
  7. The Young Entrepreneur’s Guide, Part IV: Working on Your Idea
  8. GreenhornTV: Boston’s Weekly Networking/Events Guide for Entrepreneurs – Episode 1
  9. The Young Entrepreneur’s Guide, Part III: Building a Network, Reputation and Following
  10. The Young Entrepreneur’s Guide, Part II: Getting Out There
  11. MIT 100K Elevator Pitch Contest: A Lesson in Awesome
  12. The Young Entrepreneur’s Guide, Part I: Starting from Scratch
  13. What is the Future of Marketing?
  14. WorkBar Boston: Putting the “Community” in Community Workspace
  15. Tech Addiction: What it means to ask what we’ll give up…
  16. Are You Embracing the Twitter-ized Society?
  17. Mass Innovation Nights: Great, but Not for Young Entrepeneurs
  18. 6 Lists of 12 for MIT’s Startup Bootcamp
  19. What do the Oakland Athletics, Hubspot, the Houston Rockets and LEAN Startups have in common?
  20. MassTLC unConference Session Summary: Dodging Bullets that Kill Startups (LEAN Startups)
  21. BYE Event: Upstarts: Gen Y Entrepreneurs Panel
  22. MassTLC unConference: Can We Build on the Momentum?
  23. MassTLC unConference Session Summary: Build a Community, not a Network
  24. MassTLC unConference Session Summary: TurboCharging the Entrepreneurial Culture in MA “Active – In Process – To Do List”
  25. Field Report: WebInno23 Session: An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Bootstrapping PR
  26. What is the Northeastern School of Technological Entrepreneurship?
  27. The Best Kept Secret for Young Entrepreneurs: DartBoston’s Pokin’ Holes
  28. Russ Wilcox, Mass High Tech All Star
  29. Inspiration
  30. Why I’m Blogging