The theory, practice, and tools to help you discover high-impact products.
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 […]
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 »
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
False Predictability Is Killing Product/Market Fit Read More »
Experimentation is becoming more commonplace, but this positive development is often hampered by a common problem. I see company after company testing product ideas with users and customers, collecting the results, but then failing to take meaningful action — no parking of ideas or pivoting. I call this the Build-Measure-LooksGood! loop. Why is this happening?
A common question I get is when it is ok to stop validating a product idea and switch to delivery. It’s a natural question given the pressure product teams face to execute and launch. It’s also an important question. If we stop too early we may end up launching a bad idea (we’ve all been
These days everyone seems to be talking about transformation, product-based development, and discovery. And yet, I find that many people support these concepts in principle, but can’t truly believe they can work in their companies. They see them as theory, something very futuristic, hard to do, and abstract. I disagree, but instead of giving you
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
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
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