Finish your things
Starting things is exciting but it is finishing which brings real, lasting value. Always prioritize finishing over starting.
David Tuite
Musings on product development, product management, design and other topics.
Latest posts
Modern marketing ideas from 1923
It's tempting to think that ideas like referrals and influencer marketing were conceived recently. This book shows us that marketers were employing these ideas (and more) almost 100 years ago.
Measure what matters summary
A summary of the book, Measure What Matters, by John Doerr.
Guidelines for stakeholder communication
Everyone knows that product managers have to be excellent communicators. But what does that mean exactly?
What is product management?
It's not always easy to explain what product management is. Here's my attempt.
January 2019 OKR review
My new year's resolution this year is to track my personal goals using the Objectives and Key Results methodology. Here's the results from January.
Product Roadmaps Relaunched: Chapter 7 Summary
Prioritization and the various frameworks you can use to prioritize.
Radical Focus summary
My summary of this excellent book on OKRs and getting things done by Christina Wodtke.
How to be strategic
A summary of a thought provoking article by Julie Zhuo.
Indie Hackers podcast notes. Andy Cook of Tettra
A summary of an excellent Indie Hackers episode where Andy Cook discusses hiring people, finding mentors, managing your own psychology and raising money.
The hidden cost of mediocre internal tools
It seems easy to save money by skimping on quality in internal tools. There may be a hidden cost that you're missing...
Product Roadmaps Relaunched: Chapter 6 summary
How to deal with secondary roadmap components such as target customers and confidence levels.
Product Roadmaps Relaunched: Chapter 5 summary
Themes and how to use them.
Product Roadmaps Relaunched: Chapter 4 summary
How to define your mission, vision and values.
Product Roadmaps Relaunched: Chapter 3 summary
How to gather inputs for the roadmap.
Product Roadmaps Relaunched: Chapter 2 summary
Investigating the primary and secondary components of a successful roadmap
Product Roadmaps Relaunched: Chapter 1 summary
The problems with most roadmaps and the high-level solutions to these problems.
9 principles of excellent product roadmaps
Over the years I've distilled a core set of principles which lead to improved product delivery and happier teams
a16z podcast notes
A continually updated set of notes on episodes of the a16z podcast. I don't listen to all the episodes, and when I do I don't always make notes, but when I do I publish them here.
Anatomy of a roadmap planning fail
How I tried and failed to win buyin from my own team, how I changed the way I spoke about the vision for our product and how I re-framed the conversation in a way that made sense for everyone
Attributes of good deployment tools
The following are attributes that I believe good deployment tools (e.g. Kubernetes) should have.
Product managers are products too
My personal thoughts on an article about how to treat yourself and your career as if it was a product. Useful to think about for anyone who is trying to improve their own product management skills
Real developers don't use UIs
Notes and comments on an excellent comparison of the pros and cons of web UIs vs CLIs and when each should be used
Managing product managers
My personal notes and addendums on Brandon Chu's excellent article about the investor model for managing PMs
Why does internal corporate software suck?
It's tempting to think that internal tool UX sucks because people just couldn't be bothered but perhaps there are times when "just good enough" is the answer.
4 ways to know your engineering team is siloed
We all know silos in agile engineering teams are something to avoid but can you walk into a brand new team and recognize them immediately? Here's what I've seen...
The simple value of writing down the problem
Writing down the problem is such an obvious step that nobody could miss it right? Well... sometimes people do and it causes no end of problems.
Get to the value!
Why we try to focus on one thing at a time.
Product manager: level 2
After 6 months in my new role as Product Manager, I feel like I've had an epiphany and discovered a new level of value I can add. This post explores what it is and what it means for me and my company.
Affordances on the web
How the web confuses users by hiding affordances and multiplying their total number.
Dealing with distant future work items
If a Story in the backlog is something you’d like to work on one day, but that day is definitely not in the next 12 months — does it make sense to leave that story open and sitting in the backlog, or just close it?
Tasks vs Stories vs Spikes (oh my!)
Figuring out the type of issue you're dealing with can be a common source of discombobulation. This easy analogy helps me figure out how to classify work.
Should we story point our tasks?
Or what's the difference anyway?