Adam Fishman’s Post

It's funny to look back at the launch of Startup Dad, with episodes recorded in my bedroom during the pandemic, and see how far it has come. I'm so appreciative for my earliest guests. Dads like Nick Soman, Darius Contractor, Buster Benson, Brian Balfour, Fareed Mosavat, Adam Grenier, Alex Cohen, Mike Duboe, and Matt Greenberg. Now, nearly 50 episodes in I'm talking to Dads who are executives, founders, and leaders about topics that they've never come on a podcast to talk about before: 🔹 Surrogacy 🔹 Building a company and raising a family 🔹 Male fertility 🔹 Losing a child 🔹 Building meaningful connections 🔹 ChatGPT and your kids 🔹 Divorce 🔹 Technology usage in the house 🔹 Finding more energy 🔹 Legal protections for parents 🔹 Living with your parents *and* your kids 🔹 Aging parents 🔹 Autism 🔹 ADHD 🔹 Finding time with your spouse 🔹 Stepping back from the workforce 🔹 Cultural identity 🔹 Becoming an empty nester 🔹 Religion 🔹 Guilt 🔹 Miscarriage I'm by no means a perfect Dad and neither are the dads who come on the show. But we're all sharing the successes and struggles out there and normalizing Dads talking about this stuff.

I created Startup Dad because I wanted to normalize more Dad's having conversations about the tough and rewarding aspects of parenting. In today's episode, Linus Ekenstam (design leader, co-founder of Sensive) talks about one of the toughest to discuss: male fertility. I learned this impacts ~7% of men and we never talk about it. "It's a strange journey to be honest and I can imagine a lot of guys going through this and not having anyone to talk to. When I went through it I went through my phone book like, 'who do I call?'" In classic, Startup Dad fashion, we were "joined" for a part of the episode by his youngest daughter. But that wasn't the only topic we discussed today: 👨🌾 What it means to be an "AI Gardener" 🙅♂️ Struggles with male infertility ⏱️ Time and relativity 🚧 How to navigate the daily grind with two working parents and a 4 and 2 year old 👧 A visit from his youngest daughter while recording 🤖 How he thinks technology will transform his daughter's lives 💡 Optimism for the future with AI as a useful tool This is an episode you don't want to miss -- full of talk about technology, successes, and struggles. Give it a listen (or watch!) everywhere you get your pods. Links below.

I don't think a lot of people know Mozilla beyond the 🦊 Firefox browser. I know I didn't when I started working with them. But there are a lot of *very cool* investments happening at Mozilla with small-but-mighty teams. One is Solo (link in comments below). It's an AI-website builder specifically targeted at service professionals, think: landscapers, hair stylists, carpenters, personal trainers, coaches, advisors, consultants and more. And in an interesting twist the Solo team is upending the typical monetization model from Wix, Squarespace, etc. by letting you connect your own custom domain and publish the site... for FREE. PLG at its finest 📈. If you're thinking about re-doing your personal Website I suggest you kick the tires on Solo. I was super impressed playing around with it. Nice work Raj Singh and team!

Most product managers don't realize that they have a treasure trove of customer feedback just waiting for them. I sure didn't. In today's FishmanAF Newsletter I answer the reader question: ❓ "If I'm supposed to be customer centric how do I get better at tracking and making sense of customer feedback?" With the help of colleagues like Ely Lerner, Crystal Widjaja, Behzod Sirjani, Natalie Rothfels, Jenny Wanger, and Daniel Wolchonok I break this down into three primary buckets: 1. Collecting feedback 2. Organizing and prioritizing 3. Generating insights Within feedback collection it's easy to overlook that 💎 treasure trove. There are five straightforward places you have to access feedback *without* doing deeper interviewing and discovery. 📜 Longitudinal surveys - like CSAT, NPS, or even CES (effort score) ☎ Sales calls - these are happening all the time and you need to join them (don't let Gary in sales tell you otherwise, right Leah Tharin?) 🏋♂️ Customer support - hundreds or thousands of touchpoints every month come through your support team 📩 Direct email outreach - you don't need to structure a gigantic survey; send someone a personal email! 🌟 Ratings and reviews - app stores? G2? even Yelp! Once you've identified the places then you need to organize the information: 💻 Spreadsheets - turns out this is still one of the best ways to organize information. You can sort, filter, annotate, and remember: pivot tables are your friend. ✅ Task managers - send that feedback into Notion, Coda, Asana or something else entirely and create an infinite number of additional views. 🚿 Slack firehose - engage with feedback in realtime, tag other people, and have quick back-and-forth conversations to parse the feedback 🖱 Sales/AM submission - create a submission form for your stakeholders to submit targeted information gathered on a call; useful if you can't be there. 🗓 Monthly support recap - the thousands of support tickets are only as useful as the system you have to organize them. Learn how you can train your CS team to build a better system. After collecting and organizing you've still got to generate insights. But how? ⚡ Group, categorize, tag - I'll share the system we used at ResortPass to quantify feedback, identify patterns, and attach to our roadmap. 🧠 Written knowledge base - Behzod shares details on the "What do we know about X" wiki they used at Slack. ⬇ Bias minimization and Topic modeling - Crystal shares her three part framework for reducing bias, separating signal from noise and modeling topics (pre-LLM) 🤖 LLMs - all hail the rise of the robots! Natalie shares a company she's observed that's turbo-charging insight generation from customer feedback The newsletter is below and I'd love to hear from people about their favorite non-obvious feedback mechanism. #discovery #feedback #product

Would love to hear people’s feedback on this and a comment on what your company size/type is…

Work-life balance is overrated. You can't separate the two of them; you have to integrate them. 💙 "Because everything is connected, there are no trade-offs or balancing acts. When I thrive in one area, I automatically show up as a better person in another. And that’s the point—to integrate work and family and health and everything else to live a more fulfilling life." 💙 Today's Startup Dad podcast is a conversation with Siqi Chen. A successful, serial entrepreneur, the co-founder of Runway, an angel investor and most importantly... a husband and a Dad. Learn about: 🇨🇳 His life moving back-and-forth to China as a kid ⚖️ The realities and myth of work-life balance 👩❤️💋👨 Sharing the load with your spouse 👨🍼 How his parenting and leadership has evolved over time 🏃♂️ How to exercise with your kids and incorporate them into your day 🦾 Teaching kids how to use technology as a tool for leverage 🤖 A fascinating story of how his daughter uses ChatGPT Below Siqi talks about a feeling of entitlement that creeped into his life after his first daughter was born and how he worked through that. Check out our conversation everywhere you get your podcasts or watch on Youtube! Links below. #parenting #startupdad #worklifebalance #founders

We’re not even through April and Maycember is already upon us. What is Maycember you ask? For working parents it’s the busyness of December with none of the fun lights and time off. It’s the last month of school! - Class photo day - End of year teacher gifts - End of year after care gifts (dual working parents know this well) - Sports tournaments - Sports championships - It’s baseball season! - It’s soccer season! - It’s lacrosse season! - It’s track and field season! - End of season sports banquets - School spring fundraisers - Spring concert - Spring festival - Art show - Standardized testing - Book fair - Ice cream social - Last day of school party - Graduation party - Have you booked all your camps yet?! - Do the kids have summer clothes that fit?! - Dances and proms - PTA officer elections / transition - School spirit week where each day is another thing to remember to wear/do/get - Class camping trip Parents, what else ya got? Photo courtesy of the Holderness Family YouTube channel. #workingparents #maycember

I've been providing a lot of advice lately on how to do product discovery and I realized I've left out *what to do afterwards!* 🤦♂️ In my next newsletter (dropping later this week 💧 ) I'll answer one of my biggest reader questions: how to collect, organize and prioritize customer feedback. I'm joined by ~6-7 colleagues to share their insight on... well... insights! 🎥 Here's a quick preview... Doing deep quant and qual discovery is a luxury that not everyone has all the time in the world for. But there are a lot of ways that you can be collecting customer feedback that *aren't* pre-planned discovery. - Longitudinal CSAT or NPS is one way. A 'set it and forget it' survey that triggers at the end of a customer engagement or to a randomized segment on a recurring basis is a great way of getting ongoing feedback and monitoring trends. - Sales calls! Remember your pal Gary over in sales (h/t Leah Tharin, the creator of "Gary"). He's having customer conversations constantly and often with people who aren't yet your customer (but could be). Even if you can't join the conversation you can talk to Gary about working some questions into his script and read a transcription of the call. - Customer Support. There's a reason that many fantastic product managers come out of the support function originally. They're steeped in collecting customer feedback day in and day out. Your challenge here will be how to organize this information. I've got a great example I'll share in the newsletter. - Direct Email Outreach. Even in the year 2024 you can still email some people and ask them about their experience. Yep, right from your gmail account. It's possible! What's more: it works -- response rates are higher and you'll build true evangelists in the process. - Ratings and reviews. Thanks to app stores, trust pilot, yelp, G2, and everything in between. You've got a firehose of feedback that *other* people are collecting on your behalf. Pay attention to it! I'll be expanding on these, adding in mechanisms for organizing your feedback and how to surface and prioritize insights in my next newsletter. Subscribe to the FishmanAF newsletter so it lands in your inbox -- you can also reply to those emails and give *me* feedback. Amazing, I know.

Most founders don't have the first clue about how to setup a parental leave program and haven't thought about it for themselves. The first startup I worked at sure didn't! Even worse, they don't know what to do when the parents come back and need *even more* support. When Luke Millar started his own company, Projector, that wasn't an option because he already had a few kids and his wife was pregnant with another one! "Parenting... it's not a sprint; it's a marathon. And when you're working you have to figure out how to make it sustainable. It's not just 'hey how do I get through these next four weeks.'" Five kids total, an acquisition by Medium, a work from home mandate and supporting his spouse through cancer would follow next. It turned their family lives upside down. On today's Startup Dad he talks about all of it -- including opening up about some of the very real parenting mistakes he's made and the regrets he has from them. Luke and his family's story is a powerful one. Give it a listen everywhere you get your podcasts (links below).

Shortly after I joined Lyft at the beginning of 2012 I found out that my wife was pregnant with our oldest daughter. We were a Series A startup, still called Zimride, with fewer than 20 people. Parental leave was the farthest thing from anyone's mind—no one had kids there. I didn't know what to do and took 2 weeks off because that was what I heard Dads did. I deeply regretted it. When Luke Millar (SVP product/engineering at Medium) founded his company, Projector, his wife Lisa was pregnant. He had to decide on parental support, healthcare and leave policies right away. He now has five kids and a full household! "When I started, Lisa was pregnant. We had just found out that she was pregnant and we were going to have a kid. All of these decisions that we just take for granted because your company and your HR team decides them for you at some point. It was like 'I don't know Luke, what are the policies around this? Are we doing paternity leave? How do we manage things like healthcare?'" On today's Startup Dad podcast Luke and I discuss: 👨👧 How to structure and take paternity leave as a startup founder 🤗 Building individual relationships with each of your kids when you have so many of them 🤯 How he handled the transition to working from home with a full household 👩⚕️ His wife's recent and ongoing battle with cancer 🤔 How cancer has become a big part of their parenting lives and the support systems they've needed to navigate it 🙈 Mistakes he's made as a Dad This was an amazing conversation - give it a listen (or watch) everywhere you get your podcasts. Links below.