danai's space

Feeling stuck? Not sure what you should work on next? Is it time to build your product roadmap, but you only have a few eggs in one basket? Ok, I got you. We are product people, and our job is simple (but not easy): solve customer problems . The real question is—how do you reliably identify those problems? There’s one place you should always start. Customer Support.🙌 They know your customers better than anyone else. They talk to them every single day. They hear the frustrations, the confusion, the anger, and the unmet expectations. Go sit with them. Talk to them. And most importantly, get access to their support tickets or complaints database. That’s the Holy Grail .💥 There’s nothing more valuable than a well-maintained complaints database. From Manual Pain to AI Superpower Back in the day—before large language models were widely available—you had to manually go through this data. Teams relied on N...

What I enjoy most about the role of a Product Owner is product discovery. Many of these sessions have ended in failure 😓—but looking back, I now see those failures as invaluable. Connecting the dots helped me realize that each misstep carried a lesson. Out of these experiences, I’d like to share the most common mistakes I made (and I believe many newbies do too). Leading by example in reverse !  💀 Using discovery sessions for validation: Let me explain by using a story.  When I go to yoga, my lovely instructor always says "Use your mind like a beginner. Approach each position as if you’re experiencing it for the first time." . In Greek it's called the αρχάριος νους. Αccording to  Shunryu Suzuki: In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few. I try to bring this principle into discovery sessions today—but it wasn’t always the case. In my early days, I’d tal...