Year-to-date, many of our AppSumo Originals product KPIs have successfully doubled.
These aren’t deceptively big wins on small numbers either. We’re talking products like TidyCal and BreezeDoc, with tens of thousands of users, showing major growth (like signups per day doubling).
The growth of our KPIs didn’t just come from an easy solution like “hire more people”. Our team is the same as it’s been for 12+ months.
Instead, the success comes from unique product PLANNING and PRIORITIZATION for our product updates and new features. A system learned from years of trial-and-error, seeing how others fail… and now leveraging AI.
For some founders and executives, product planning seems “obvious”. Listen to some customers, come up with ideas you like, and done.
But that’s all wrong. And most founders and executives don’t product plan nearly as well as they think.
With the strategy we’ve spent years refining, today we rapidly create a product plan that maximizes ROI, reduces the back-and-forth questions between Product team members (developers, designers), and hits 80%+ on-time releases.
To keep things simple, the product plan is easily visible in a Google Document for the entire team and stakeholders to understand. We don’t need to comb through six Notion docs… that links to three different Trello boards… that links to three different JIRA areas.
Instead, we keep it simple and obvious.
Product planning is so misunderstood that it’s a become key part of my executive coaching. When founders and executives start to plan correctly, they immediately see revenue increase.
Put another way, effective and efficient product planning is one of the keys for how we’ve grown AppSumo Originals from $0 to a multi-million dollar business with a fraction of the team and marketing budget as other companies our size.
Today, I’m going to share our exact product planning process we use (including AI). You’ll be able to copy-and-paste these prompts into ChatGPT and plan more effectively yourself.
Continue reading →