Hire Us

Railsware Blog

on product management, engineering, design, culture and many more...

5 Non-Obvious Skills Product Managers Should Master

Over the years, I’ve read countless articles about essential skills for product managers. They all mention the usual suspects: strong communication skills, leadership ability, decision-making, and so on. Basically, the same skills we’ve been developing since childhood or college. But what about the stuff they hardly taught us in school? …

6 Common Pitfalls Product Managers Should Avoid

Every product manager’s career journey is marked by trial and error; especially the early years. Making mistakes is natural – even expected. Sometimes, poor boundaries, rushed decision-making, and lack of communciation are the root causes of our mistakes. But what if you could avoid some of these pitfalls entirely? With …

How to Prioritize with the RICE Framework

Prioritization in product development is a tricky business. How do you define prioritization criteria, navigate differences in stakeholder opinions, and prevent personal bias from skewing your estimates? Truthfully, there’s no perfect formula, but frameworks – like the RICE scoring model – can help make the whole process less confusing. What …

Guide to Rapid Prototyping

Research from McKinsey shows that around 50% of product launches fail to hit business targets. The major causes? Poor strategic planning, which includes a lack of risk assessment in early product development. At Railsware, we’ve spent years fine-tuning our development process to avoid these pitfalls. Rapid prototyping is one of …

Product Features Explained

Conceptualizing, building, and implementing new features is a core aspect of a product manager’s job. But striking a balance between feature quantity and product quality is difficult, even when product managers have a clear vision and strategy for the product. Stakeholder expectations, customer demands, and differences of opinion within the …

A Week in the Life of a Railsware Product Lead

The definition of a product manager’s role can vary from company to company, or even team to team. It all comes down to factors like the industry, the specific niche, team size, and where the product is in its life cycle. Here at Railsware, we wanted to give our perspective …

Best Product Management Podcasts

There are thousands of business and tech podcasts out there, all vying for your time and attention. Without reading dozens of different articles – all with the same suggestions, give or take – how do you narrow down that list to a reasonable five/six picks? And avoid listening to the …

Product Management for Startups

So you’ve just landed a job as a product manager at a startup. Now what? Maybe you’re unsure about the extent of your responsibilites, or how to structure the product decision-making process. Maybe you’ve never worked with such a small team before, and don’t know what’s expected from you as …

Do You Need a Public Roadmap For Your Product?

In an effort to build transparency, boost engagement, and keep investors in the loop, many startups have opted to release public product roadmaps. But are they actually useful? What tangible benefits do they bring, and what are the risks? If you’re unsure about whether a public roadmap is a good …

Real-Life Cases of JTBD Framework

The Jobs to Be Done framework is a powerful tool for understanding the motivations and challenges of customers. It lets us dive much deeper into the context behind customer decisions than personas or user stories do. But to help you get the most out of the framework, we need to …