Last week I published this cartoon on LinkedIn. It went instantly viral: Tokens spent (as well as the other metrics shown) are of course not meaningless, but everyone got the joke: The latter point generated some interesting conversation. One commenter threw the ball back into my court: “Great point. The harder question remains. What are […]
There’s a certain type of meme, often called “how to create a minimal viable product”, that’s been making the rounds in the product web for years. I must have seen at least 5 original versions and they all disagree with each other. Not very originally, I felt that they all missed the mark and decided
Skateboards, Cars, and the Return of Code-First Discovery Read More »
There’s no shortage of AI hype at the moment and that includes lots of speculation about the future (or lack there of) of product management. In this article I’ll review three PM predictions that are circulating in the product-sphere — The AI-PM, Developer PM, and No-PM futures. I’ll discuss each to see whether it is
3 Trendy AI PM Archetypes, and 1 We Actually Need Read More »
Why is product discovery — the practice of identifying the right things to build before switching to delivery — so hard to implement? In my previous article I described two systemic problems: must-have features and weak goals. In this article I’ll focus on three key challenges that the are down to the product org itself.
Many companies recognize it’s better to develop products through research, experimentation, and evidence-guided decisions, yet few are able to make product discovery truly work. While the concept has been around for a long time, implementation is often half-hearted, partial and ineffective. AI dev hype is making things worse. In this and the following artile I’ll
We are regularly told that AI has caused a deep shift in product development. The old patterns are no longer relevant, and you have to either adapt or die. In this article I’ll try to assess if that’s indeed the case. Have we fundamentally changed the way we develop and sell tech products? Is this
Marty Kagan and Elias Lieberich, just published an article titled “The Product Model at Google”. It’s a good article that gets many things right, but I think there’s also a more nuanced picture that’s worth talking about. I see Google as an example of a company that used to have one of the best product
The Product Operating Model at Google – A Critical View Read More »
Whenever I teach product discovery, someone will raise their hand and ask a variant of this question: “This feels slow. Wouldn’t it be faster to just launch it and see what happens?” The answer is No. If you skip product discovery you may get bits into production faster, but you’ll create value far slower. This
All tech companies have to choose what to build, but approaches vary — from top-down projects to bottom-up research and experimentation. Your company is probably somewhere on this gamut, but it’s not always a deliberate choice. It’s important to realize that these are not the only two possible models, and that there isn’t necessarily just
Impact is a central concept in product development, but it’s often unerdused or misused. In this article I want to suggest a thinking tool, The Total Impact Matrix, to help you use it better. The impact of an idea is the sum of value it creates for our target audience — customers/users/partners — and for