Product Discovery Archives

The Product Operating Model at Google – A Critical View

Anti-Patterns, Product Discovery, Product Operating Model, Product Stategy

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 […]

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Why Not Just Launch It? (AI Edition)

Experimentation/Validation, Product Discovery, Product Management

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

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AI and Product Management: Becoming More Evidence-Guided

Product Discovery

Generative AI is transforming product management, or so we’re told by AI companies and influencers. The vision appears to be all about output: The PM producing roadmaps, backlogs, PRDs, user stories, and prototypes faster than ever before. Some companies are accepting these claims as truth and pressuring their PMs to use AI, but in my

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You’re Not Just Solving User Problems

Frameworks and Tools, Prioritization, Product Discovery

I regularly ask product people how they choose what to develop. Today, an increasingly popular answer is “we focus on the most important user problems”, or its more modern cousin “we prioritize opportunities”. Underlying these answers is a classic model that asserts that product development has to start with mapping out and prioritizing customer problems,

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The Lifecycle of Goals: Research, Discover, Deliver, Monitor

Goals and OKRs, Product Discovery, Roadmaps and Planning

Product companies tend to manage the lifecycle of projects (AKA ideas) — from the moment the project/initiative is approved until it is shipped. But in a reality where most ideas fail to create value, it is far more important to manage the lifecycle of goals (what we’re attempting to achieve)— from the moment the goal

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Your Customers Are Not Always Right

Prioritization, Product Discovery

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

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Adopting Evidence-Guided Development in Your Org

Product Discovery, Product Operating Model

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

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Is Your Company Evidence-Guided?

Product Discovery

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

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Why I Wrote A Book About Evidence-Guided Development

Product Discovery, Product Operating Model

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

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False Predictability Is Killing Product/Market Fit

Anti-Patterns, Product Discovery

I recently met a product team, let’s call it Team Red, who is developing a new product in an established, traditional industry. On the surface Team Red has it all: it is cross-functional, fully-staffed, well-funded, working towards clear business goals, and is empowered to make decisions. And yet as we sat down to talk, I

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