Moulton
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Harnessing the latest AI advancements to elevate your product delivery capabilities. Discovery and definition can be completely reimagined, making it easier to build products that truly delight your customers and stay ahead of the innovation curve.

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Leverage our experience hiring, managing and mentoring dozens of product managers to ensure your team is setup to do the best work of their careers.

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Let's take a fresh look at your product management team to help ensure they’re delivering maximum value and staying focused on what matters most for your company’s success. Think of it as a tune-up to keep everything aligned with your goals.

Meet Steve

Based in Chicago, Steve Moulton is a product leader with seventeen years experience leading successful product organizations. He has a proven track record of building and managing teams that deliver exceptional results. From startups to large enterprises, Steve has led teams that consistently put the customer first and achieve outstanding outcomes.A founder at Teamer, Steve led the product and technology organization from concept to three million users worldwide, winning multiple awards along the way. Following Teamer's acquisition, he moved into the Fintech space, leading a team of eight product managers at OneMain Financial.Following a stint at PayPal, leading the relaunch of PayPal's Cashback Mastercard to seventy million US customers, Steve was recruited to start the product management function at Above Lending, helping them achieve 5x revenue growth in his first year.Most recently, he was a Director of Product at Enova, leading product management in their Pangea Money Transfer division.

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Trade your Roadmap for a Product PlanAssumptions:- Tech infrastructure projects are being handled as a separate process.
- Your business has a list of things it could be working on that is subjected to a prioritization processThink of it as a product plan, not a roadmapIt may seem pedantic, but I prefer to call the prioritization of upcoming initiatives a product plan as opposed to a roadmap. This is an idea put forward by Marty Cagan in his book Inspired. A plan more accurately describes how we choose initiatives for prioritization. We all know it is important to plan, but we also recognize that plans will change as circumstances change. Not just in our career, but in life in general. By building a product plan, we acknowledge that this is the best path forward for now, but we have to be flexible and adapt as circumstances change. A roadmap feels like something that is set in stone, something we all march towards despite changes in the macro or micro environment that might occur.The situation to avoid is having stakeholders believe that because feature xyz is listed on the roadmap as beginning work six months from now, that somehow this is immovable. A lot can happen in six months and it simply may not be in the best interests of the business to build the feature in the timeline laid out in a roadmap.I recall in a previous role, a marketing team produced a thirty five test AB testing roadmap for the upcoming 12 month period, complete with start and end dates and success criteria. I asked what they felt should happen if the first four failed to meet the success criteria. The answer received was to start the fifth test. My follow up question was what if the fifth test is significantly more successful than expected, should we act upon that new information or just start the sixth test? We ended up identifying the five that we felt could have the greatest impact on enabling us to hit our current objectives. We kicked two of them off and agreed to regroup after they reached statistical significance to see what we’ve learned, before deciding which test to run next. It is very important to have a plan, but that plan has to be regularly assessed against the current state of the business and updated as new opportunities arise. Doing something simply because ‘it is on the roadmap’ can lead us down the wrong path.How do you ensure your plan captures the right activities?Most businesses have no shortage of ideas of what to work on next. Depending on size, maturity and nature of the business different teams will have contrasting ideas on the direction the product should go. So understanding the company’s objectives becomes the crucial starting point in forming a product plan. I see this as an extension of the OKR framework, to also include activities (OKRAs). If the business understands its objectives and the key results that will help them reach those objectives, then the product plan is made up of the activities that enable us to achieve those key results.Having a shared set of objectives across the business also simplifies prioritization meetings. Each activity is assessed in the context of the objectives and key results that are understood by all. It removes some of the horse trading and politics that can creep into prioritization exercises.Don’t fall into the trap of having one or two objectives and judging every activity against them. Even if you have a north star as a business, there should typically be 5-7 objectives that create an environment in which you can hit that north star. More than that and you might be applying resources to non essential work. If you have less than four objectives, you may be missing critical pieces that will enable your success. If the north star is $100m in revenue and you have one objective which is to increase sales, maybe you miss that your current tech infrastructure can’t support a business doing $100m in sales. We need to think holistically about the overall needs of the business. A runner doesn’t typically train by just running. They also focus on diet, strength and conditioning, working on improving their mental strength etc... Each of these components come together to give them the best chance in their target race. In the same way a company with one objective, is probably missing key components in trying to hit their north star.If you can develop 5-7 objectives, each with 2-3 key results, prioritization becomes a process of understanding which activities enable you to hit your key results.In my experience going through this process quarterly has typically been the right cadence. Objectives will change over the course of a year, so checking in every 12-13 weeks to ensure that the business is still focused on the correct objectives and that the activities in the product plan are aligned with the key results makes sense.Who is responsible for creating, owning and executing the plan?The creation of the plan is a collaborative effort, no one part of the organization is responsible as great ideas should be allowed to come from any source.The plan is an aggregation of thoughts and ideas from across the business. Product is responsible for bringing the voice of the customer to the process. A good product team is in daily contact with their customers through a range of methods. The first product I brought to market saw rapid growth after launch and as one of the three founders, we all handled customer support tickets. It was two years before we were in a position to hire dedicated support staff. Those tickets every day and the conversations they spawned gave us a deep insight into the problems our customers were facing. We didn’t build everything suggested, but the friction points were easy to identify when you were hearing about them every day. There are many tools that generate excellent data on customer interactions, showing you recordings of customer sessions, collecting data on every action taken on your product. As helpful as they are, don’t let these tools replace daily communication with customers, you have to hear some problems first hand to truly understand the root cause and start working on a solution.Not everything that makes it into the plan begins with the customer, but It’s important that those who are creating the plan have a great understanding of the needs of the customer. This will help you avoid making assumptions about what the customer wants, which can result in weeks and months of work being devoted to projects that don’t actually solve a customer problem and bring limited value to the business.How long should your plan extend out?Many teams like to work off twelve month plans, in my opinion anything beyond six months should be considered very speculative.In December 2019, I was engaged in an annual planning exercise for the year ahead that cumulatively took several hundred hours of time across the leadership team. Eventually, we agreed on approximately twenty five initiatives, spread out through the year. Within ten weeks, the beginning of the pandemic had fundamentally changed the company’s objectives and the planning work that was done at the end of 2019 was now almost worthless. The pandemic may seem like an extreme example to prove a point, but much more recently, the macroeconomic picture has been changing rapidly, forcing companies to rewrite plans almost quarterly. In the last nine months, many businesses have gone from scaling for growth to pulling back as interest rates rise rapidly. In the Fall of 2022, we had almost unanimous agreement across financial industry leaders that a recession was imminent, but recent indicators suggest the recession may be very shallow if it happens at all.None of this suggests we should proceed without a plan, we just need to build a plan that enables us to deal with rapid change -I’ve started breaking the plan into four distinct parts -0-6 weeks
6-12 weeks
3-6 months
6-12 months0-6 weeks - For a lot of teams this constitutes the next three sprints, but regardless of your sprint cadence, I always want to have a very clear idea of what we are working on for the next six weeks. By that I mean, not only do we have requirements documented and design work completed, we also have epics created and the work broken out into stories for those epics. In many cases those stories have been through grooming and are assigned. The team would be pushing back pretty hard on changes to the plan within this period, so that they can execute successfully. That is not to say that no other work will be considered, if a really great opportunity arises that could provide a strong tangible benefit to the company, that can warrant usurping something within the six week plan. These changes should be relatively rare and the benefit should be well understood by all.6-12 weeks - The items on the plan that are 6-12 weeks out, would be high priority items that have gone through analysis in quarterly planning and a decision made that they need to be tackled in the short term. They are very unlikely to be deprioritized unless there is a significant change in the objectives of the business. The product team would be working daily with our partners across the business and technology to ensure we are documenting a solution to the problem we are trying to solve. User experience design would be moving from discovery into creating the proposed user experience and circulating ideas with product, engineering and other teams in the business to gather feedback. Again, it is understood that something may come and trump the projects that are 6-12 weeks out, but the business case would need to be especially strong.3-6 months - At quarterly planning there is typically a set of projects that don’t quite make the cut as high priority for the upcoming quarter, but there is general agreement that they should be done. Maybe we are seeing the early indicators of a potential opportunity that has yet to be proven. These initiatives require more discovery work from the product team. They are at the point of needing to be documented, with a clear explanation of the potential opportunity and the document is updated regularly as discovery work unearths additional information. All things being equal, many of these projects will be worked on, but some will not. There will be enough change in the next three months to warrant some to be no longer a priority. Other opportunities will emerge that will push some initiatives further down the plan.6-12 months - As I mentioned earlier, I consider anything beyond six months to be highly speculative. Thinking through plans and roadmaps I’ve contributed to over the last five years, the majority of items that were more than six months into the future, never made it into development. This isn’t a surprise, if a cross functional group can’t make a case to work on something in the next six months, it’s very likely non-essential to the business. I’m happy to have the product team discuss these ideas at a high level and provide insight. Some will warrant some high level discovery to gain more clarity on feasibility or potential impact. These ideas should be documented with high level notes reflecting the limited discovery work that was done.As a product leader, I’m regularly reminded that the only constant is change. This doesn’t mean that plans and roadmaps are worthless, there is still a lot of value in planning but we have to construct a plan that is flexible enough to enable us to change course and be honest enough to recognize when the existing plan doesn’t fit the needs of the business. Breaking the plan into four separate time periods helps me to ensure we are always working on the most important initiatives relative to the company’s current objectives. I can also set expectations with stakeholders, so they understand why we are working on specific projects currently, without having to commit to projects six months into the future. The rapid change that we’ve experienced in the last three years, means we should take the approach that this is the plan, until we come up with a better one.How does your organization manage roadmaps? Let's connect and discuss how we can help you prioritize what really matters for your customers and your business

Ten Questions for Product Manager InterviewsAssumptions:- Role is an individual contributor, could be PM or Senior PM
- Some technical knowledge needed, but not necessarily a technical PM.Over the last five years, I’ve interviewed more than a hundred product managers for four different companies. The positions have ranged from entry level to VP of Product. The companies have ranged from startups to multi billion dollar fintechs. From these interviews, I’ve been part of panels that have hired approximately twenty six product managers. Among this group are some of the best PMs I’ve ever worked with and others that for one reason or another didn’t work out. Each time I go through a round of interviews for a new position I take time to see how I can improve the interview process to increase my chances of a successful outcome.The interview process itself is imperfect. You could be looking for someone to become an integral part of your team over the next five years and depending on your interview process you might have only 45-60 minutes to talk with the candidate. Maybe that 45 minutes is on a Zoom call, which adds another layer of complexity in trying to make a connection.Over the course of fifteen years, hiring and managing product managers as well as working on large initiatives that will impact millions of customers at launch, I’ve come up with five criteria I look for in great product managers. The best I’ve worked with excel at each of these and I can’t think of one that had the five and didn’t succeed.The five in no order of importance are -- Discovery
- Finding solutions to problems
- Delivery
- Communication
- Relationship managementSo it stands to reason that if you are interviewing to find a great product manager, trying to assess how they might perform in each area should form the basis of your interview. Time is precious so we’ll try and identify two questions for each area that can help us ascertain a candidate’s skill. That is ten questions that can form the basis of your product manager interview, you may decide to go deeper into some areas depending on how the interview is going.Let’s look at each one in more detail and figure out how we might assess someone’s ability at an interview.DiscoveryWhen I talk about discovery, I mean the process of discovering opportunities for improvement in a product. Sometimes this can involve identifying customer friction points through a variety of methods. These methods can include studying customer support interactions, setting up customer focus groups, using tools like Hotjar and Heap to view actual customer sessions and identify trouble spots in a particular user experience. This is a really fundamental skill of a product manager, I can’t think of a product management role I’ve hired for that didn’t involve the need to analyze customer interactions in great detail. Discovery work is not confined to your customers and your product, it often involves competitor and industry analysis, so good product managers need to have an excellent understanding of the overall landscape your business is operating in.I tend to use my two questions to gauge a candidate’s overall approach to an area and then give them an opportunity to provide a specific example from their career.Can you talk in detail about effective methods of product discovery that you have used in your current/most recent role? Can you speak to a specific example where product discovery you did identified an opportunity that the business wasn’t previously aware of?Finding SolutionsOnce an opportunity has been identified, the business needs a solution to address the opportunity. This might be a problem that needs to be solved, or it could be a new feature that our discovery work suggests will improve customer experience or increase engagement. I’m more interested in the method here than I am in the result. Most product managers have a list of things they brought to market that had some degree of success and a number that didn’t solve the problem. There can be a hundred factors that determine whether a solution was successful or not. What I’m more interested in here is the process the PM goes through when building a solution.
Almost every PM will tell you that they favor an agile approach, but that in itself tells us very little, it has become a meaningless word thrown in to check a box. What I’m looking to avoid here is a PM who thinks that working with the business on requirements, sending those requirements to a designer to build some mockups and then with the mockups, creating stories for engineers and putting them into a two week sprint is somehow agile development. What I love to hear is that the PM has created a small product team empowered to address the opportunity. Before requirements have been written, product, user experience design, engineering, data analytics, potentially QA come together and assess the problem together. All these members of a product team have the potential to contribute great ideas to the conversation. At a minimum you avoid wasting two weeks proposing a solution that when it eventually gets in front of engineering turns out to be not feasible. Empowered product teams have a much better chance of creating a winning solution than a PM writing requirements in isolation, without the expertise of the other groups.Two questions that can help us to understand how a candidate builds solutions: Once you’ve identified an opportunity, what process do you follow to build a great solution that addresses the opportunity? Talk about a solution you’ve worked on in your career that you are most proud of and why?DeliveryWhether you call this delivery or execution, this is the task of getting your solution in front of customers. This is a broad topic that encompasses everything from how the product manager partners with engineering, creates and manages timelines, sets expectations with stakeholders, ensures a seamless rollout and identifies success criteria. You could easily spend forty five minutes just on this topic alone. I tend to focus on partnering with engineering and the process of getting stories delivered on time. We can cover some of the other subjects when we discuss communication and relationship management.In my experience the best outcomes are achieved when product and technology speak with one voice. To the rest of the business they appear as one team, celebrate successes together and share accountability. A PM blaming tech for a missed deliverable is often a red flag. There are usually multiple reasons why a deliverable gets missed and the important thing is to identify the causes and ensure they don’t reappear next time around. I’ve seen the blame game erode trust, fracture teams and lead to additional missed deliverables further down the line.
I’ll also look to go into detail on how timelines are created, communicated and managed. It seems obvious that the people building the solution should have a say in the timeline, and yet it’s incredibly common for arbitrary deadlines to be imposed on engineering, often by people with little or no understanding of what is involved in building the solution. At the same time, we need to get a viable solution in front of customers so we can learn and iterate. I find that hearing how a candidate manages this delicate balance is particularly informative. Engineers feeling like arbitrary timelines are being imposed on them and stakeholders having no belief that product and tech can actually deliver on time are two of the most common contentious issues tech companies face.Two questions that can help us assess how a product manager deals with these issues are -
Once you’ve agreed on a solution, can you talk through the steps you take to ensure it gets in front of customers? Tell me about a missed deliverable on an important initiative you worked on, why was it missed, how did you handle the fallout?CommunicationGeorge Bernard Shaw is credited with saying, ‘The single biggest problem with communication, is the illusion it has taken place’. As a leader of product teams, I get reminded of this quote at least weekly, at times it’s been a lot more frequent than that!
I’m not sure it is possible to be a poor communicator and a strong PM. It’s just such a fundamental part of the job. I also believe it is the hardest thing to try and assess during an interview process. Of course, if a candidate struggles in articulating thoughts and ideas with you as an interviewer, it is probably a showstopper, but the issue I’ve most commonly faced in PM interviews is people that communicated very well in that environment, got a thumbs up from all participants in the debrief and then didn’t communicate well at all in the actual role. There are not many roles in a business where it is typically necessary to communicate weekly with engineers, business stakeholders, leadership, PM team members and customers, but this is usually the remit for a PM especially if they are senior product managers or higher. I don’t think there is a question that is a silver bullet to identify poor communicators in interviews, but two that can help inform you would be -You are PM for a mission critical feature that the team will work on for three months. Talk me through your communication strategy for ensuring each of the following groups have all the necessary information about the new feature. Tech, Leadership, Legal, Customers. Tell me about a time when you think your communication wasn’t as effective as it should have been. What were the consequences, how did it help you become a better communicator?Relationship managementWhile communication and relationship management share similarities, I think there is enough nuance there to treat them separately. Communication ensures that all the relevant contributors to an effort, have the information they need to have, when they need to have it. Relationship management is ensuring you have built a relationship with the various contributors to the effort, that will give you the best chance of success. There is no one size fits all approach here, not only is the relationship needed with each team within a business different, you may need to have very different relationships with the individual members of a team to ensure the best outcome for the business.When addressing relationship management, I’ve had product managers tell me that they get on well with everybody they work with. While that is better than having bad relationships with your colleagues, it is often the sign of a potential problem. As a product manager there are going to be times when you need people to go the extra mile. Every one responds to that request differently and you have to find the key to inspiring that colleague to make a special effort. Sometimes that involves showing gratitude, sometimes empathy, on occasion you’ll have to be firm and make it clear that there will be negative consequences if a deliverable isn’t met. Depend too much on that approach and you’ll likely lose capital over time and execution becomes a lot more challenging as your colleagues no longer buy in.
Two questions on relationship management -
Tell me how you build strong cross functional relationships across the business. I’m most interested in hearing how those relationships differ depending on the team you are partnering with? Tell me about a time when you had to manage conflict with a colleague. What was the cause of the conflict and how did you resolve the issue?If your candidate is performing well in the first five areas I’ve discussed, almost all the pieces are in place for you to have discovered a great product manager. They’ve checked all the boxes, but are you a good fit for them, or more specifically is your company culture one where this candidate can be successful? It should be easy to identify obvious issues, like the role requires you to be in the office three days a week, but the candidate only wants remote. What is trickier to determine is whether the way you work creates an environment that will enable this candidate to thrive. There is no doubt that startup environments differ pretty significantly from more mature established companies, there is usually a different set of problems to solve. It has become popular for job postings to highlight that the role will have a large degree of autonomy and the individual will be empowered to fulfill their potential. These factors can be crucial in a candidates decision making process, remembering that good candidates are often picking from multiple offers. Is that what is actually happening at your company or are product managers actually there to focus primarily on delivering the ideas of the leadership team? This is more common than many of us are willing to admit. Think about the next twelve to twenty four months for the role and make sure that the expectations of the candidate align with the role. If you don’t you are just going to spend a lot of time and energy hiring to then hire again six to twelve months later.The questions really depend on the company culture, try to be very honest. If the culture is one where the focus is on getting to market quickly, failing fast and iterating, make sure that’s well explained and understood. If you tend to be more risk averse, with longer development cycles that requires a different approach from a product manager.If you can cover these five areas of product management as well as overall culture fit, I think you'll have made very good use of the available time in an interview. There is no silver bullet that enables you to find the right candidate each time, but these ten questions get to the heart of what most product manager roles entail. I'd love to hear thoughts, comments and opinions.

Trust is the Key to Getting the Best Out of Product ManagersHiring top talent is the most critical investment for any company. The process is time-consuming, expensive, and often requires a team effort. But the investment doesn't end once the contract is signed, that’s where the real work begins. One of the most critical elements to setting up a new product manager for success is trust. Without trust, even the most talented product managers will struggle to thrive in your organization, leaving their true potential untapped.When you hire a new product manager, it's essential to ensure they feel like they can do the best work of their career. The onboarding process isn't just about getting them familiar with your product or team, it’s about setting the tone for how much you believe in them. This belief translates into trust, and without that foundation, it becomes difficult for them to feel empowered enough to take risks, think creatively, and bring their best selves to work.As leaders, we devote massive amounts of time, energy, and resources into the hiring process. We pay recruiters, sift through resumes, create interview panels, and conduct multiple rounds of interviews to ensure we hire the best candidate. However, that investment is rendered meaningless if we don't set that new hire up for success by fostering an environment where trust is implicit. The excitement you feel about a new hire should be matched by the confidence you have in their potential. Otherwise, all the effort leading up to that point becomes wasted.It is not uncommon to hear leaders say that 'trust is earned', which does not seem unreasonable, but this approach can quickly stifle creativity, autonomy, and engagement. When a product manager feels that every decision or idea they present is being judged through a lens of skepticism, they are far less likely to take bold risks or push innovative ideas. Instead, trust yourself and your hiring panel that the right person was chosen. Trust that this individual is capable of exceeding your expectations, and give them the space to prove it.It's possible that, despite all your efforts, a new hire might not be the right fit for the role. But if you start from a place of trust and create an environment where they can do their best work, you’ll at least have the certainty that you did everything possible to set them up for success. The worst outcome isn’t necessarily discovering that a hire isn’t a fit, but rather being left wondering whether you created the right environment for them to fulfill the promise you saw during the hiring process.Throughout my career, I’ve seen firsthand the stark contrast between low and high trust environments for product managers. In low trust settings, creativity stalls, morale plummets, and product managers shy away from taking risks. The fear of failure becomes paralyzing, leading to a cycle where PMs struggle to meet expectations, a self fulfilling prophecy driven by the absence of trust. Conversely, in high trust environments, failure is reframed as a stepping stone to success. Product managers are empowered to experiment, learn from mistakes, and ultimately find the innovative solutions that truly serve customersBill Campbell, the legendary coach to some of the most successful tech leaders including Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin, held a powerful belief about leadership. He said, "Leadership is about recognizing that there’s greatness in everyone, and your job is to create an environment where that greatness can emerge." I wholeheartedly agree with this philosophy. Trust is the key to unlocking that greatness, especially in product managers, whose job relies heavily on navigating ambiguity, solving complex problems, and rallying teams around shared goals.In the end, we all understand that not every hire will turn out perfectly. But if you lead with trust, you increase the chances of discovering and nurturing the greatness within your team. Even when it doesn’t work out, you can rest assured that you’ve done everything in your power to create an environment conducive to success. And when it does work out, the results can be extraordinary.

AI is Becoming a Game Changer in Product DiscoveryAnalyzing customer insights has always been an essential part of product discovery, but historically, it has been a hugely time consuming process. Product managers would spend countless hours manually reviewing surveys, app store reviews, helpdesk tickets, customer emails, and phone calls, trying to piece together common trends and pain points. Despite the importance of understanding customer feedback, the sheer amount of data involved often made it difficult for product teams to dedicate the necessary time and resources. As a result, many teams found that they simply did not have the bandwidth to go deep into customer insights, leading to delayed product improvements and missed opportunities.One of the major limitations of the traditional approach to analyzing customer feedback was its reliance on manual effort. Product managers often had to rely on customer service representatives to surface common issues and pain points. While well intentioned, this approach introduced bias into the process and often produced anecdotal, rather than data-driven, insights. For example, a customer service agent might overemphasize the frequency or importance of a particular issue because it was top of mind, skewing the feedback given to the product team.Moreover, manually analyzing thousands of customer interactions across different channels, such as surveys, support tickets, phone calls, meant that only a small fraction of data could realistically be reviewed. This left product managers with an incomplete understanding of customer needs, resulting in roadmaps that were not as tightly aligned with customer feedback as they needed to be.Advancements in AI have made it possible to gather and analyze customer insights with far less upfront investment of time and resources. AI powered tools are now capable of analyzing vast amounts of data from multiple sources, quickly and accurately. By automating the labor-intensive parts of customer feedback analysis, AI enables product managers to focus on deriving strategic insights and making informed decisions, rather than sifting through endless lines of data.There are multiple tools available now that harness AI's power in customer insight analysis to review survey responses and identify trends far more efficiently than manual analysis ever could. With natural language processing (NLP), we can quickly categorize responses into themes, sentiment, and even emotional tone. This makes it easier for product teams to spot trends and customer pain points in real-time, allowing for faster product adjustments and a clearer understanding of user sentiment across various touchpoints.I’ve been using customer support leaders like Zendesk and Intercom for the last ten years and they are now investing heavily in AI to improve how support tickets are analyzed. With thousands of support tickets pouring in from customers daily, manually identifying recurring issues was previously a daunting task. Now, AI can automatically process this data, analyzing patterns, identifying common problems, and offering product managers deeper insights into what customers are saying. This level of analysis would have been impossible to achieve manually, allowing teams to gain a richer understanding of customer concerns without the time-consuming effort.One of the most challenging aspects of analyzing customer insights used to be reviewing phone calls between customers and support teams. While direct phone conversations can provide product managers with rich, firsthand insights into customer frustrations, the manual review process was extremely time-consuming. Today, AI tools like Chorus and Otter have transformed how these conversations are analyzed.These tools transcribe and analyze phone calls, picking out specific words, phrases, and emotional tones that indicate customer pain points. While it remains important for product managers to hear about customer frustrations in their own words, AI can save hours by flagging the most relevant conversations for deeper review. This ensures that product managers spend their time on the highest-value insights without missing the context and richness that come from hearing customers’ voices directly.AI has fundamentally changed the way product managers can approach customer insight analysis. What was once a time-consuming, often incomplete process can now be done more effectively and at scale. As a result, product managers can make better informed decisions faster, aligning their roadmaps more closely with customer needs and delivering solutions that address real pain points more effectively.Let's connect and discuss how improving your team's product discovery capabilities can play a big role in enabling your company to hit its 2025 goals.

How AI is Transforming Data-Driven Decision MakingMarty Cagan famously wrote in Inspired that “really good teams assume that at least three-quarters of the ideas won’t perform like they hope.” This has long been the reality in product management, teams often invest significant time and resources into features or products only to find that they don’t resonate with customers. Ten years ago, this assumption was necessary. However, advancements in AI mean that product teams today can approach decision-making with a much clearer understanding of what will work and what won’t, before they make those costly investments.
AI can now simulate potential outcomes, flagging features that are unlikely to perform well before any coding begins. This ability to predict success or failure based on historical data, user behavior patterns, and market trends means that product teams can confidently focus their efforts on initiatives that are more likely to drive real value. In other words, AI allows teams to be more certain of their decisions, drastically reducing the waste of time, money, and effort on ideas that won’t work.In today’s fast-paced business environment, the ability to make informed, data-driven decisions can be the difference between success and stagnation. Traditionally, organizations have relied on methods like A/B testing to optimize their products and services, but these approaches can be both time-consuming and uncertain. However, advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are now revolutionizing the way organizations approach decision-making, providing faster, more accurate, and less biased insights than ever before.While effective in some cases, A/B testing is often a lengthy process. Teams may have to wait weeks or even months for tests to reach statistical significance. Even then, the results can leave product managers uncertain about what customers truly want. Variables such as external market conditions or customer context can influence outcomes, making it difficult to determine if the results of the A/B test reflect long-term customer preferences or merely short-term anomalies.
This lag in insights can slow down product development and lead to decision fatigue, as teams constantly question whether the results are significant enough to act upon. In the end, many product teams are left with more questions than answers, unsure whether to proceed with implementing changes or to revert to previous versions of a feature.The latest AI and machine learning tools offer a solution to this challenge by not only analyzing vast datasets in real time but also by suggesting or making decisions based on patterns, trends, and predictions. These AI-driven insights go beyond simply observing behavior, they can identify hidden correlations, predict future outcomes, and recommend specific actions, all while reducing the manual effort traditionally required for data analysis.By leveraging AI, organizations can process enormous amounts of data to gain faster, more accurate insights without waiting for weeks of testing. The best part? AI reduces human biases that can cloud judgment during manual data analysis. This means that product teams can focus on what really matters: implementing strategies and features that are more likely to succeed based on data-driven predictions.As AI becomes increasingly integrated into the decision-making process, we’re seeing even the most established players in business intelligence and data analysis, such as Looker and Tableau, pivot to incorporate AI-powered insights into their product suites. These platforms, once synonymous with manual reporting and data visualization, now offer automated insights that help product managers make more informed decisions. By staying ahead of the curve, they aim to fend off disrupters like H2O.ai, BigML, and Sisense, which are building AI-first platforms designed to provide predictive analytics and decision automation right out of the box. This shift to predictive analytics can help teams forecast outcomes such as customer churn, sales performance, or feature adoption. Rather than relying on historical data alone, these tools can model future scenarios and help product teams make proactive decisions. For example, if AI models suggest a high likelihood of customer churn for a particular segment, the team can quickly adjust their customer engagement strategy to mitigate this risk saving both time and resources.AI is fundamentally changing how organizations approach data-driven decision making. By automating data analysis, reducing biases, and providing predictive insights, AI tools are enabling product teams to make faster, smarter decisions than ever before. The future of product management no longer requires waiting weeks for A/B test results or relying on gut instincts. Instead, AI-powered decision-making provides the clarity and confidence needed to deliver features that are far more likely to succeed, saving time, resources, and driving greater customer satisfaction in the process.

End-to-End Product Development Services with Moulton Consulting and Aecor Digital
At Moulton Consulting, in partnership with Aecor Digital, we offer a comprehensive approach to product development. From product discovery to release management, we provide the expertise and technical capability that startups and small businesses need to compete effectively, at a fraction of the cost of local resources.Expertise You Can TrustSteve Moulton has seventeen years of experience as a Product Leader, building teams and products that deliver best in class customer experiences. Steve has successfully led product teams at PayPal, OneMain Financial, Above Lending, and Enova International, and co-founded Teamer, a product that grew to serve over three million users.
On the engineering side, Aecor Digital brings a lean, agile approach to product development. Their iterative process, planning, executing, and evaluating, is built to adapt to change and maintain project momentum. With robust delivery processes, Aecor simplifies complexity to ensure projects run smoothly and meet business goals.Comprehensive Product Development Lifecycle SupportOur collaboration spans five key stages of product development, each designed to maximize customer satisfaction and business results.
1. Discover: We begin by deeply understanding your customers’’ needs. Through listening and analysis, we uncover pain points and identify opportunities for innovation.
2. Define: We utilize our expertize across product, design, and engineering to create solutions that prioritize both customer delight and business objectives.
3. Develop: Using industry-leading engineering practices, Aecor will bring your product to life. With a focus on delivering on time and within budget, we ensure your project moves seamlessly from concept to completion.
4. Test: We rigorously test the product to ensure it’s ready for real-world use, giving you the confidence that your customers will love the final product.
5. Support: Post-launch, we stay with you to ensure the solution delivers on its promise. Our goals are aligned with yours, ensuring long-term success and value.A Cost-Effective SolutionWe understand that many startups and small businesses face challenges in sourcing high-quality product and engineering resources at a reasonable cost. That’s why we’ve developed a solution that allows you to access top-tier product management and engineering skills at approximately 70% less than the local cost. By leveraging Aecor Digital’s offshore talent, you receive the best of both worlds: world-class product development at a price that fits your budget.Let’s ConnectIf you’re looking for a cost-effective and efficient way to bring your product ideas to life, we’d love to hear from you. Lets discuss how we can partner with you to achieve your business goals and exceed your customers’ expectations.