Anvil

Most Product teams underestimate the cost of “just building” the features they need. They think that it'll be a quick fix, but often ends up costing their teams months of effort. Recently, I ran a workshop with PMs evaluating a common problem: turning a long, compliance-required document sequence into a smooth, digital onboarding experience. The initial instinct? “Let’s just build our own form → PDF pipeline.” But when we broke it down: - 6–8 weeks of engineering time - Complex data validation & resubmission logic - Compliance & audit trail requirements - Long-term maintenance nobody wants to own The reality became clear: Building this would have been a terrible decision for the PM. This is where tools like Anvil shines. Upload the PDF once: - Auto-generate a webform - Embed it in your onboarding flow - Receive structured JSON → directly to your backend Hours, not weeks. And more importantly: Your engineers stay focused on your core product, not building another PDF engine the business never intended to maintain. If you’re a PM: Buy vs Build is not just a technical choice, it’s a business leadership decision. Focus your teams on what makes you different, not what just needs to get done. If you want to try out Anvil for your PM career, check it out in the link below 👇 #ai #aipm #product #productmanagement

Trying to break into a 𝘁𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁 𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗿 role? Here’s one lesson that’ll set you apart. When document automation startup Anvil looked at PDFs, they didn’t just say “this format is frustrating.” They dug deeper. Why are PDFs so hard to work with? They learned that PDFs are coordinate-based, built for precision printing, not dynamic layouts. That insight shaped their roadmap: 1) They started by using AI to detect and label form fields, reducing manual work. 2) Then, they built workflows to automate how data moves through those PDFs, making the old system more efficient. 3) Finally, once they fully understood the limits of the format, they launched a dynamic document editor to help customers break free of PDFs entirely. That’s the kind of thinking great technical PMs are hired for. 💡 If you’re trying to land a technical PM role: Don’t just say you “work well with engineers.” Prove you understand how systems actually work, and how that shapes product strategy. Here’s how to do that in practice: 🔍 Ask “why” until you find the constraint. Show curiosity about what’s technically possible or not. 🧩 Sequence your roadmap around limits. Improve within the system before trying to replace it. 🧠 Build technical empathy. You don’t need to code, but you should understand the trade-offs engineers face. You’re not being hired to code. You’re being hired to think like someone who could. 📌 Sponsor note: This post is made in partnership with Anvil, turning data into PDFs (& vice versa) and automating heavy document workflows. Learn more in the link in the comments. #productmanagement #techcareers #AnvilPartner

Building my side gig this past year has been a true masterclass. The deliverables? Those are the fun part. The real time sink no one talks about? The paperwork. -Contracts. -Compliance docs. -Onboarding forms that ask for your blood type and mother's maiden name. It's the kind of work that hijacks your weekends and makes you wonder if you accidentally enrolled in law school instead of starting a business. And yet, this stuff isn’t optional. Skip it, and the risk can crush your business before it scales. The worst part? Most tools I tried made it harder: ❌ Too expensive for a one-person show. ❌ Too bloated with features I’ll never use. ❌ Too confusing for something that should be simple. Then I found Anvil ✔️ Contracts signed in minutes. ✔️ Forms pre-filled automatically. ✔️ Scales with an API without me rebuilding the wheel. I've cut my admin time by 20% - that's a few hours back every week that I can spend on actual client work instead of paperwork archaeology. If you're drowning in admin, stop treating it like a cost of doing business. There are better ways. * #AnvilPartner - but I only partner with tools I actually use and would recommend anyway. **Also massive shoutout to Mang-Git Ng to making my life easier. #contentcreation #soloentrepreneur #creatoreconomy #influencer

In an era of flashy new AI tools, it's a powerful reminder that the most successful products don't invent new needs. They simply make existing ones effortless. As product managers, we're often chasing to build the next big, flashy product. But as an example, robust businesses focusing on e-signatures & document infrastructure, reveals a powerful lesson: ** Massive value can be unlocked by solving a seemingly mundane problem with relentless focus on the user ** Here are a few key takeaways: 🌍 Solve a painful, universal problem. Manual tasks like printing, signing, scanning, and faxing documents are universal. Across industries, organizations are burdened with fragmented, unstructured data scattered across multiple systems. Recognize this as a universal challenge, one that doesn’t require the creation of a new market. Great products often succeed by taking existing, inefficient workflows and transforming them. Focus on the pain points caused by disorganized data and fragmented processes, and look for ways to deliver real, tangible value by simplifying and streamlining them. 💼 Focus on the "Job to Be Done." The "job" here isn't just to put a signature on a document. It is to complete a contract, close a deal, or finalize an agreement, securely and legally. Make sure you solve for just that: a transparent audit trail, legally binding certificates, secure authentication. 🤝 Trust and security above all else. Trust isn't just a feature you can add to a product; it's the bedrock that enables your entire business. It's the essential element that gets customers to walk through the door and keeps them coming back. As you think about your next product challenge, look for the everyday frustrations and build a solution that is so simple, secure, and reliable that it becomes a new standard. 📌 Sponsor note: This post is made in partnership with Anvil, turning data into PDFs and automating heavy document workflows. Learn more in the link in the comments. #productmanagement #productmanager #userexperience #AnvilPartner

What exactly does a 𝗣𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺 𝗣𝗠 do? 🤔 Most product managers build features for users. Platform PMs build systems for builders. 🧱 Here’s a real-world example: Carta, the equity management platform, wanted to help LLCs generate and sign customized legal agreements inside their product. Instead of building a PDF engine, form builder, and e-sign system from scratch, they embedded Anvil’s platform building blocks — APIs for PDF generation, data mapping, and signing. In other words, they assembled the solution using prebuilt “LEGO blocks” rather than forging new ones. 🧩 That’s what a Platform PM does inside a company. They define, prioritize, and manage those reusable “LEGO blocks” (like internal APIs, services, and frameworks) so that feature teams can move faster. Their customers aren’t end-users, they’re internal developers. Their success metric isn’t engagement or conversion; it’s developer velocity⚡and reuse. A good Platform PM: • Thinks in systems, not screens • Designs for scalability and consistency • Measures how much faster (and safer) other teams can ship The best ones make themselves almost invisible — you don’t notice them because everything just works. So next time you hear “Platform PM,” think of the people making sure every product team has the right building blocks to innovate quickly — whether those blocks come from Anvil, Stripe, or internal APIs. 📌 Sponsor note: This post is made in partnership with Anvil, turning data into PDFs and automating heavy document workflows. Learn more in the link in the comments. #productmanagement #techcareers #AnvilPartner

💡 Great products don’t just happen. They’re built on great processes. As a Product Manager, your job isn’t only to choose the right features. It’s to create the conditions for your team to build them faster, better, and at scale 🚀. One of the most overlooked ways to do that? Workflow automation 🤖 Why it matters: Every manual step you leave in place becomes a recurring tax on your team’s time. Slow, manual workflows delay launches and invite errors. Hidden process friction quietly damages user experience. The best PMs treat automation hunting like they treat product-market fit: relentlessly. Every hour saved from repetitive work is an hour invested in solving customer problems. Automation isn’t just about efficiency. It’s a force multiplier: ⚡ Makes your team more agile ⚡ Improves product reliability ⚡ Accelerates your roadmap These aren’t just “ops” issues. They’re product issues. When workflows are slow, releases are slow. When workflows are broken, user experience suffers. The PM automation mindset: 🔍 Map the workflow. ⚡ Find the bottlenecks. 🔄 Replace repetitive tasks with automation. The results? Faster release cycles. Happier users. More room for innovation 🌟 If it happens more than once, find a way to automate it. The most successful products aren’t just well-designed; they’re built on streamlined, scalable workflows. 📌 Sponsor note: This post is made in partnership with Anvil, turning data into PDFs and automating heavy document workflows. Learn more in the link in the comments. #ProductManagement #Workflows #Leadership #Efficiency #AnvilPartner