If you’re a product person Generative AI should be firmly on your radar, not least because some think that it will replace you soon. Hyperbole aside, it’s very reasonable to assume Gen-AI will affect, maybe transform, product development. But what’s going to change? And are there any downsides? As this is a very new technology, […]
What Does Generative AI Mean For Product Development? Read More »
It’s no secret that product management is often a misunderstood and misused role. Many companies restrict PMs to narrow, stereotypical jobs, hindering their potential impact. Without strong role models, some PMs fall victim to these product management myths and perpetuate them to new hires. Here are six wrong ways to think about the product managers,
6 Product Manager Stereotypes To Avoid Read More »
Observing tech companies you may notice a broad, disturbing phenomenon: everyone’s hard at work “selling” their product ideas — stakeholders and engineers are selling to product managers, product managers are selling to management, and management is selling to everyone (just listen attentively in the next all-hands meeting). As a product manager I too had to
Don’t Let Hype Run Your Product Read More »
When talking to product managers, company leaders, and customer-facing folk, a common belief surfaces: if enough customers (b2c), or an important customer (b2b) ask for something, then we should build it. This axiom is reflected in prioritization discussions as well as in many product management tools that rank ideas by “customer votes”. Customer feedback, whether it
Your Customers Are Not Always Right Read More »
Recently the product sphere had boiled-over over Airbnb removing product managers from product teams and converting them into product marketing managers. The Airbnb transformation may be a one-of (essentially an attempt to adopt the centralist Steve Jobs / Apple model), but the story and the discussion that followed surfaced an age-old debate: who should rule
Who Should Rule the Product? Read More »
As I’m writing this, the dreaded yearly planning cycle is just around the corner and the debate over roadmaps is surfacing once more. On one hand it’s clear that classic roadmaps that show releases on a timeline create both high planning overhead and high waste. On the other hand, attempts to construct roadmaps around outcomes
Planning With Outcome Roadmaps Read More »
Idea prioritization exercises are often hard and unsatisfying. The discussions run long and the decisions feel suboptimal. Using numeric methods like ICE or RICE adds more process, but not necessarily more clarity, as the numbers feel “made up”. I’ve written in the past about how to make better use of ICE, but I have to
Why You’re Struggling to Prioritize Read More »
This is an excerpt from my book, Evidence-Guided: Creating High Impact Products in the Face of Uncertainty. While the chapter references the GIST Model (Goals, Ideas, Steps, Tasks), the methods described can be used broadly. Switching to an evidence-guided mode of work is rarely easy. The people developing the product and influencing it have to
Adopting Evidence-Guided Development in Your Org Read More »
As I teach evidence-guided product development I encounter two types of reactions. Most people realize that their company is caught in a vicious cycle of plan-and-execute that heavily relies on opinions, consensus, and HiPPO. But when presented with the alternative — using research, experimentation, building product through discovery and delivery — various types of objections
Is Your Company Evidence-Guided? Read More »
On Feb 1st 2018 I published my most viral article. Originally shared on Medium and LinkedIn, it got hundreds of thousands of reads, and was liked and shared in a volume I haven’t seen before or since. It’s still my most popular article, What was all the fuss about? In this article I first shared the GIST
Why I Wrote A Book About Evidence-Guided Development Read More »