The theory, practice, and tools to help you discover high-impact products.
In a famous essay Martin Eriksson defined product management as “the intersection between the functions of business, technology and user experience.” While it’s flattering to imagine ourselves as the center of things, it’s also a strange way to define a role. Why do we need a function in an organization that is a composite of […]
Why Customer Value Is The Most Important Thing Read More »
I regularly meet teams that carry a heavy burden of guilt—they don’t experiment as much as they should. They aspire to build-measure-learn, but they mostly design-build-launch. They wish to run dozens of experiments per month, but barely squeeze-in one per quarter (and even that is typically a late-stage “MVP”.) Both the teams and their managers
Think Learning, Not Experiments Read More »
An awful lot of effort is going these days into boosting product teams’ productivity: getting them to burn those story points faster, deliver the planned scope in every sprint and cycle, and generally ship more stuff, faster. The term “development velocity” is often thrown around by executives, but what they’re actually aiming for is upping
Stop Obsessing Over Development Velocity, Focus on This Instead Read More »
UPDATE: I published a longer and far more detailed explanation of these techniques in my free eBook Testing Product Ideas Handbook Here are a few important things to know about product ideas: 1) the vast majority of ideas lead to no measurable improvements in business results or value-to-customer (some actually cause negative results) 2) No one, no matter how senior
Idea Validation — Much More Than Just A/B Experiments Read More »
Ever since I started writing about the GIST framework (Goals, Ideas, Steps, Tasks) and helping teams implement it, the question the comes up the most is “what tool should we use?” While I don’t think tools are are as important as we tend to think, in this post I’ll give you a few options, including a new tool that
The GIST Board and Other GIST Tools Read More »
How to use the confidence meter tool and iterative testing to make sure you invest in the right product ideas.
Idea Prioritization With ICE and The Confidence Meter Read More »
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
Why you should stop using product roadmaps and try the GIST Framework Read More »
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.
Evidence scores — the acid test of your ideas Read More »
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
Building your project for learning AND execution Read More »
There’s something inherently problematic about the way we plan our products and services. An uncomfortable truth that’s rarely stated. David M. Upton and Bradley R. Staats wrote the following on IT projects: “The fundamental problem with these systems is that for the most part, they’re constructed using what programmer and open source champion Eric Raymond
Are You Building a Cathedral? Read More »