Writing — Nora Chaynane

✦ Writing

Mountains & Minds

PM frameworks, growth experiments, and hard-won lessons from a decade of building products across four continents.

Published

Why Your Roadmap Is a Lie (And What to Do Instead)

Most product roadmaps are just guesses dressed up in Notion. Here's the framework I use to build roadmaps that actually survive contact with customers.

→The 3 signals that should override any roadmap item
→How to say no to a VP without losing the relationship
→What a 'confident roadmap' actually looks like vs. a performative one

Read the full piece→

02AIPublished

8 min read

I Fed 4,000 Customer Tickets Into an AI. Here's What It Found.

Support tickets are the most underused data source in product. I built a pipeline to process them at scale — and the output changed our roadmap priority order.

→The exact prompt chain I used to extract insight from raw text
→What the AI surfaced that our NPS surveys completely missed
→Why 'sentiment analysis' alone is useless — and what to do instead

Read the full piece→

03GrowthPublished

5 min read

The Pricing Page Test That Generated $2.1M

We changed four things simultaneously. Conversion went from 2.3% to 3.8%. This is the full breakdown — variables tested, results, and what we'd do differently.

→Why we tested plan order before price point
→The one CTA change that drove 60% of the lift
→How to run a multivariate test without destroying statistical validity

Read the full piece→

04ProductPublished

7 min read

Feature Adoption Is a Product Problem, Not a Marketing Problem

300K users. 23% adoption after 90 days. The instinct was to run a campaign. The actual fix was inside the product.

→How to audit a feature funnel in 2 weeks without a data team
→The 3 friction points that killed adoption before users hit value
→Why 'send an email' is always the wrong first answer

Read the full piece→

In the pipeline

05Emerging MarketsComing Soon

9 min read

Building Products for MENA: What Silicon Valley Frameworks Get Wrong

Cash-on-delivery is still the dominant payment method in Morocco. Arabic RTL breaks most component libraries. Five years of building taught me what the playbooks don't cover.

→The localization mistakes that kill MENA product launches
→How to run user research when digital trust is low
→Payment flow design for cash-dominant markets

06LeadershipComing Soon

5 min read

How to Influence Without Authority (A PM's Most Important Skill)

PMs own outcomes but control nothing. No engineering team reports to you. No designer has to listen. Here's how to get things shipped anyway.

→The pre-meeting technique that eliminates most room resistance
→How to frame data so engineers actually change their minds
→What I learned about influence from three years of UN advocacy work