(Update: this article used to be called “Product-led is Just as Bad as Sales-Driven”. This conflicted with the term “product-led growth” [PLG] which threw people off. I replaced all the uses of product-led to make it clear I’m not talking about PLG). A common complaint I hear from product folk is that management is too […]
Product-Centric is Just as Bad as Sales-Driven 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 »
It was mid 2004 and my colleagues and I were gathered in a cinema hall in Tel Aviv to hear our American CEO speak. The charismatic gentleman on stage was all smiles and positive energy. He told us he was proud of what we had achieved that year. There was one topic, though, that made
A Lean Approach to Opportunities and Threats Read More »
The Coronavirus pandemic has turned into a global health and humanitarian crisis. But even when we will beat it and go back to work things will not be as they were. There are clear signs of a global economic recession, if not a full depression. There’s much uncertainty, but it’s likely that for a number
Planning and Execution in a Time of Crisis Read More »
Managers and product managers are often frustrated by the apparent lack of care the development team is showing for the needs of the business. The team is forever busy with engineering and design projects (some visible and some well hidden), while business-critical projects are dragging on at a snail’s pace. When a long-awaited product or
Breaking The Walls Between Business and Agile Teams Read More »
Imagine finding yourself in an elevator with your CEO or top investor. After a brief hello she lands the big question on you: “How is the product doing?” You have 30 seconds to answer. A simple “all good” won’t cut it — you need numbers. Your mind runs through your dashboard. Each metric conveys a
The Three True-North Metrics that Your Product and Business Need 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 »
UPDATE: I published a free eBook that covers OKRs (and OKR pitfalls) in much more depth: OKRs Done Right. Since their invention at Intel in the early 1970s, Objectives and Key Results have amassed a huge following. It certainly helps that Google, Amazon, Dropbox and other tech super-companies attribute so much of their success to
5 Ways Your Company May Be Misusing OKRs 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 »
Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value. — Albert Einstein Value for user (as opposed to value of a user) is a critically important product concept. It’s at the bottom of product/market fit, growth, revenue and basically much more. Few things help products more than injecting them with lots and lots of value.
10 Ways to Build More Value Into Your Product Read More »