What makes the best product companies different, and how to to build a product organization that creates high-impact products at speed in the face of uncertainty
Everyone’s figuring out their AI strategy now. But a strategy has to be guided by a vision — how the world will be different, for better or for worse, due to AI, and how these changes will affect your target market. Armed with this vision you can choose your part in the future (mission) and […]
Developing a Transformational Vision for AI and Beyond Read More »
Building great products — ones that deliver high value to the customers and to the company — is extremely hard. This is evident from discussions I hold with product people, who regularly report not being able to create impact. It’s also clear from data: A/B experiment statistics, feature usage data, and startup failure rates, all
Why Is Product So Hard? Read More »
We all strive for certainty — if we do X, Y will happen. Certainty is comforting; it allows us to operate without fear, doubt, or having to think too much. Many of the processes your company employs, especially strategy, roadmap, and project planning, are meant to create certainty — Here’s what we need to do
Embracing Uncertainty: A Modern Take On Strategy, Goals, and Roadmaps Read More »
In part 1 of this article series I discussed the principles high-performing companies use to accelerate and improve the quality of their decisions. In this article I want to give you specific techniques to do the same, including the ACID model, not judging decisions by their results, and publicly killing HiPPOs. This is a long
A Culture of Good Decision-Making (Part 2) Read More »
Many organizations struggle with decisions-making: both speed and quality are well below where they need to be. Key contributing factors include: While these challenges are common, slow, bad decisions are not a universal problem. Some organizations are able to make good decisions fast and at scale. In this two-part article series I’ll cover the most
A Culture of Good Decision-Making (Part 1) Read More »
Recently the product sphere had boiled-over over Airbnb removing product managers from product teams and converting them into product marketing managers. The Airbnb transformation may be a one-of (essentially an attempt to adopt the centralist Steve Jobs / Apple model), but the story and the discussion that followed surfaced an age-old debate: who should rule
Who Should Rule the Product? Read More »
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
Adopting Evidence-Guided Development in Your Org Read More »
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 »
Like it or not, many of us are working in feature factories . We’re churning out feature after feature, trying to deliver on a roadmap. To some that’s just how it’s supposed to be, but for others Feature Factory became the banner term for all that’s wrong with traditional product development. Why are we
Moving from Feature Factories to Value Generators Read More »
Product Management has been around for a good 40 years, but many companies are still figuring out the basics, including the role of PMs, their reporting line, and relationship with other disciplines. Getting these things wrong can waste a lot of your product management resources and frustrate both the PMs and the people working with them. In
Three Common PM Role Antipatterns Read More »