Which is the bigger risk for your product right now? Shipping with a feature your customers don’t value? Or delaying your release in order to ship with something they do value?… Read More

Most people and teams conflate prioritizing and sequencing of work. Prioritization is the process of deciding what is important to do, and sequencing is deciding what order to do it in. Shap… Read More

I’m excited to be joining my friend Jon Harmer, Lead Product Manager at Google, in teaching Product Mangers how to drive business impact. In our cohort-based class on Dec 2-3, 2023, wi… Read More

Product strategy manifests as a collection of bets, investment decisions to do something or not, to do things now or later. A business case requires you to compare the predicted costs with t… Read More

Your process can prevent collaboration. The language you use in your problem statements can stop collaboration too. When you use proxy variables instead of economic measures of outcome you p… Read More

When deciding what to measure, we often choose metrics which sound good or metrics which are easy. These mistakes can make a product strategy incoherent, excessively expensive, and ineffecti… Read More

Estimating with ranges requires a level of transparency which may be uncomfortable because you are acknowledging what you don’t know. Doing this, however, cascades into multiple positi… Read More

Product management is fundamentally a discipline of decision-making. Which investments to make, which problems to solve, which customers to serve, etc. The approach we take to decisions is f… Read More

Quantifying the impact of your problems puts them in perspective. It also exposes the assumptions you’re making, creating a virtuous cycle helping you to improve your framing of the pr… Read More

Good product management is understanding the problems your customers want to solve, how your customers get value from solving those problems, and figuring out how best to help them. We need… Read More

There is more to identifying who’s problem you’re trying to solve – you need to also have a sense for the context in which they experience the problem. Problem statements s… Read More

There’s a difference between who is exposed to a situation (many people) and who experiences that situation as a meaningful problem they would like to solve (a select few). It is impor… Read More

In my previous article, I shared an improved template for writing problem statements. Knowing a good structure is necessary, but you also need to avoid filling the good template with bad con… Read More

To improve how you build products, you need to write problem statements defining which problems you intend to solve. This helps your thinking, shapes your strategy, and creates purpose for y… Read More

Every company competes in a dynamic market. Staying the course is drifting off course. When you don’t use problem statements to express your intent, there are no signals to help your o… Read More

The overwhelming emphasis I see in product organizations is on sequencing the execution of the product strategy over the upcoming quarters. Optimizing the product operations work to deliver… Read More

Most of the teams I’ve helped either didn’t use problem statements, or didn’t use them well. Without improving, they spend more time and money than needed to build things… Read More

Helping teams to shift from a task-focus to writing user stories requires a different approach than simply introducing user stories as a new tool. You have to adapt the existing practices… Read More

When evaluating a product, a customer may see the product as special, adequate, inadequate, or awful. What is uncomfortable for product teams is they have no control over how the customer se… Read More

The shift from inside-out to outside-in is necessary to become more effective as a product development organization. We cannot build it and (expect) they will come. Here’s how to thin… Read More

A common suggestion from product development teams when asked how to improve their working environment, is to “spend less time in meetings.” I’ve felt this way personally w… Read More

Orienting to value – every team, every person does it differently.  How you orient to value limits how much value you can create.  People with a naive orientation can only sc… Read More

When solving complex problems at scale, we use epics, features, and stories to align, focus, and coordinate the work of multiple teams to achieve the objectives of our organizations. … Read More

In our continuing series on managing the risk in your backlog, we look at the risk of kidding ourselves. Specifically, we use cause and effect and hypotheses to identify the assumptions in o… Read More

When deciding how to invest in your product, you need to take into account the risks that your investments will not return the outcomes you desire. One class of risks is business risk, … Read More

As Steven Haines first told me, “strategy first, roadmap second.” There is a step between the two – deciding which problems you will focus on solving with your product. St… Read More

Understanding your users is critical to developing good products.  A “complete” understanding is sometimes required, and always comes at a cost.  A contextualized unde… Read More

You know you’re a product manager when this image causes more than a chuckle. A few random thoughts inspired by this Rorschach test of product management concepts from sunk cost falla… Read More

The pop-culture concept of a silver bullet – a simple solution to a hard problem – is a dangerous idea.  It can be used to over-promise, and doom a team to under-delivery… Read More

Taking agile, a process otherwise optimized for small, cross-functional, collaborative teams and making it work at scale is fascinating. You have to change some elements, and retain others… Read More

Assumptions are interesting things – we all make them all the time, and we rarely acknowledge that we’re doing it.  When it comes to developing a product strategy – o… Read More

Being “outside-in”, “outcome-based”, and “market-driven” is particularly important for creating successful products.  The problem is that just sayin… Read More

Defining and building a good minimum viable product is much harder than it sounds.  Finding that “one thing” you can do, which people want, is really about a lot more… Read More

How do you work with professional services, consulting, field engineers, etc. to make your product better? Do you just treat their inputs as yet another channel for feature requests, o… Read More

Product owners and product managers.  Two roles, often done by one person.  Together, the product people need to take an organization’s strategy, figure out the appropr… Read More

If you ask someone if they require encryption on their device, first of all, you will likely get one of two answers – yes or no – useful for segmenting your market or devel… Read More

Product owners are likely to find themselves alone in the organizational wilderness. Their organizations expect them to connect the towers of long-term strategic planning with the fron… Read More

Software as a Service is not a one and done transactional offering.  A product or business built on SaaS is built on the subscription model – recurring revenu… Read More

We hear a lot about building products which are “good enough” or “just barely good enough.” How do we know what “good enough” means for our customers? &n… Read More

Your product roadmap is a view of what you are building right now, in the near future, and in the more distant future.  Or is your roadmap a view of why you are building what… Read More

  “Agile” is something most teams do wrong*, without realizing they’re doing it wrong.  A good 2×2 matrix acts as a lens, helping to convert information in… Read More

Theodore Levitt may have developed the whole product model to help companies compete more effectively with their products.  We wrote about the whole product game based on Mr… Read More

Agile is not magical. Changing from a waterfall process to an agile process changes how your team works, and helps eliminate inefficiencies. Adopting an agile process does not let you magic… Read More

Is your team focusing on the mechanics of creating good software, without understanding the connections from your efforts to your goals? Are you primarily focused on the structure of use ca… Read More

Wrapping up the your product failed because you didn’t enable your users to realize value branch of the root causes of product failure, is this article on the context in which yo… Read More

Next up in the series on the root causes of product failure – products that fail because you have ignored the user’s level of experience.  The first time someone uses your… Read More

This article continues the series exploring the root causes of product failure.  Even when you target the right users, and identify which of their problems are important to solve, you… Read More

Having an outside-in bias as a product manager is important – you need to understand how your customers (or your customer’s customers) would value capabilities you might build i… Read More

Continuing the series on root causes of product failure, this article looks at the impact of focusing on the wrong user goals.  Even if you have picked the right users, you may have pi… Read More

Exploring the reasons that a product might fail in the market is a useful way to triage and assess what you need to do to prevent the failure of your product.  Instead of taking the &l… Read More