Creating Product Strategy with Multiple Strategic Tracks (MuST)
Product strategy is hard. In this article I explain how to use the MuST technique to create a multi-hit product strategy.
Escaping the Vicious Cycle of Plan & Execute
Tell me if this sounds familiar: Well-thought-out strategies change seemingly every other quarter. 9-month projects that take two years to complete. Disgruntled managers talking about “low velocity”, “lack of ‘can do’ culture”. Skeptical employees talking about lack of vision, bad planning, politics. Spending lots of time on planning, replanning, scope-downs Disappointing launches that customers generally …
Idea Prioritization With ICE and The Confidence Meter
How to use the confidence meter tool and iterative testing to make sure you invest in the right product ideas.
5 Tips for Building Effective Product Management Teams
Let PMs Be PMs Product management is at an interesting point. More and more companies embrace it as a way to supercharge the business, gratify customers and align the org, yet few product teams are able to deliver on these big expectations. I get asked by managers quite frequently how to get PMs to deliver more, …
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Video: The Mechanics of Growth
This is a talk I gave summarizing what I consider to be the best practices for driving growth (often called “Growth Hacking”) based on my own experience leading growth in Gmail and on examples from hyper-growth companies like Facebook, AirBnB, and Instagram. Some of the things I touch on: Finding a North Star and/or One …
Why you should stop using product roadmaps and try the GIST Framework
Why I Quit Product Roadmaps Over the years I created my fair share of product strategies, product roadmaps and project gantts. I don’t do them anymore. I found a better alternative which I’ll explain below. First, here’s what I used to do: This form of planning is a ton of work — just getting all stakeholders to …
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Case Study: How Fever uses A/B experiments and data analysis to double customer lifetime value
Last April mobile event discovery startup, Fever, invited me to help with its growth initiative. Fever helps users discover and book events — from parties to fashion, food and fitness. The service gained traction in Madrid, New York, London and other cities, generating over 3 million bookings last year, and reaching a unique monthly audience of over …
Evidence scores — the acid test of your ideas
Finding and building the next big idea is the holy grail of any tech company. Unfortunately the statistics are against us: when subjected to A/B testing most ideas turn out to produce no impact or even negative impact, and at least one analysis suggests that you need 3000 raw ideas to produce one commercial success. …
Why The Impact Effort Prioritization Matrix Doesn’t Work
The Impact/Effort matrix is a classic product managment tool, helping to prioritize product ideas. See why often it doesn’t work correctly and how to fix.
Building your project for learning AND execution
In tech we have huge bias for execution – building things and launching them fast and with the right quality. A million underwhelming launches later, we now know we should focus on something else: Learning — systematically discovering the right product, market and business model. All execution and no learning exposes you to launching a great product …
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