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Building Rocketships: A Journey and Lessons in Product Leadership 🚀
This summer, like many in tech, I found myself with a bit of extra time. After wrapping up some hands-on work building AI-native products at EIG, I decided to pause before diving into the next big role. I love creating and scaling products, but I’ve learned over time that agency life isn’t my jam. I started thinking about the right next step, and that’s when I remembered that some of my favorite product leaders—Oji and Ezinne Udezue—were writing a book.
Naturally, I thought diving into their book might give me some fresh perspectives. But when I went to grab a copy, I realized it wasn’t out yet. So, I did the next logical thing: I reached out to Ezinne directly to ask when it’d be available. Long story short, they were in the final stages of wrapping up Building Rocketships, and I ended up offering to help with the launch instead.
Behind the Scenes of Building Rocketships
Over the past few months, I’ve had the chance to dig into the book, provide feedback, and help with the launch. What started as a landi
ng page, ended up being a chance to work closely with Oji on a number of different things and a chance to level up my WordPress skills — Kudos to Jamie Marsland for the tutorials on cover block layouts and glassmorphic floating nav.
The book itself is packed with insights for anyone in product leadership, from aspiring PMs to seasoned veterans. And here’s what I love most: Oji and Ezinne aren’t just talking the talk—they’re giving away a big chunk of the content for free. They want this knowledge to be accessible to teams everywhere, especially those just starting out. For those who want more hands-on tools, they’re also offering a premium version with Coda templates and worksheets to help teams act on the book’s lessons immediately.
Chapters That Stood Out
While the whole book is gold, a few chapters really resonated with me:
Finding and Solving the Sharpest Problems: A masterclass on identifying the high-impact challenges that can move the needle.
Building Virality Into Your Product: It’s not just about word of mouth; it’s about engineering your product to grow itself.
Creating a Customer Listening Machine: A guide to developing processes that ensure your customers’ voices are always front and center.
Favorite “Moments” From the Book
"In a sense, AI is the dawning of the Product Golden Age, where technological limitations nor incumbents can stop the best ideas from winning."
"Sharp problems are not always obvious. They can typically only be discovered via customer immersion and knowledge. The best PMs and founders tend to be those who are deeply and personally insightful about a problem that needs solving."
"For the customer, 'magical' lives at the intersection of simple and powerful."
"The most important ideas in creating product systems are: They are necessary and need deliberate design. They must be maintained to stave off entropy. They must be malleable and changeable or they will not serve the organization very long."
"Playbooks should be a floor on how to innovate, not a ceiling. Innovative teams must incentivize and trust each other to improve methods quickly and make good decisions that impact the group."
A Book You Can Use. Now.
While I’m pretty excited about the book itself, I’m more excited about the work that Ezinne has been doing to collect artifacts, critical resources, and to build out a usable workbook with the Coda.io team. Access to these tools will be bundled with the Pro version of the book, so if you work as part of a product team I highly recommend the premium version — you can most likely expense it as a tool/purchase for productivity anyway.
If you’re looking for more inspiration from hands-on product leaders, check out my go-to list from 2024.
If you made it this far you probably enjoyed it at least a little bit right? Please do me a favor and share it with at least one other person right now. It’s an easy way to keep me motivated and writing more content for you.