Software product success.
I learned a lesson a long time ago – your level of confidence is irrelevant when estimating outcomes. What matters is the justification for your confidence. The Believability Index is the tool to use to better predict, and thereby improve your outcomes. Decisions We make investment decisions to support our […]
The shift from talking about what we want to build to talking about the problems we want to solve is easy to understand, but can be difficult to do well. We have to make decisions about which problems we will solve first. We have to make decisions about how grand […]
Vibe coding, as a faster way to tell people what to build is penny-wise, but pound-foolish. Too many people are latching onto a “show don’t tell” metaphor for making it easier and faster to tell their teams what to build. The same forces which make this possible are making this […]
How do you debate how to build something you’ve been asked to build? There are several constraints which affect choices – non-functional requirements (NFRs), cost, capacity, and capability are easy ones to discuss. And while all of those are relevant, an altogether different factor has dramatically more impact on your […]
How you define ‘good enough’ is contextual – but not in the way you might think. Almost all problem solving has an implicit nature of diminishing returns. Progressively more investment results in progressively less benefit. How do you know when to stop making those investments? The best way is to […]
In the early modern period clocks worked through an engineering miracle of pendulums and springs. You would wind a clock, to tighten the spring, which provided the tiniest of nudges to keep a pendulum swinging. This regular, periodic swing of the pendulum is what allowed clocks to tell time. People […]
What we want from our leaders is for them to set a direction. To inspire us to advance a strategy or realize a vision. What we get too often is dictation, where they tell us what they want us to build. Changing this relationship requires us to change how we […]
“I don’t get to set the direction. Leadership tells us the big projects they’ve decided to do, it’s up to us to elaborate and execute.” This is a common situation for a lot of product managers. They’ve been told that some big initiative is happening, and it’s up to them […]
Which is the bigger risk for your product right now? Shipping with a feature your customers don’t value? Or delaying your release in order to ship with something they do value? User Feedback vs. Deadline I recently answered a LinkedIn Pulse Question – “How would you navigate incorporating user feedback […]
Most people and teams conflate prioritizing and sequencing of work. Prioritization is the process of deciding what is important to do, and sequencing is deciding what order to do it in. Shaping a product strategy involves both. First you decide which problems are important to solve. Then you decide which […]
I’m excited to be joining my friend Jon Harmer, Lead Product Manager at Google, in teaching Product Mangers how to drive business impact. In our cohort-based class on Dec 2-3, 2023, with live instruction and hands-on work, we will teach the critical practices to being effective at meeting customer needs […]
Product strategy manifests as a collection of bets, investment decisions to do something or not, to do things now or later. A business case requires you to compare the predicted costs with the expected benefits. Your problem statement must articulate the expected benefit in economic terms to support your decision […]
Your process can prevent collaboration. The language you use in your problem statements can stop collaboration too. When you use proxy variables instead of economic measures of outcome you prevent your teams from collaborating and you reduce the likelihood of achieving product success. This article is the second in a […]
When deciding what to measure, we often choose metrics which sound good or metrics which are easy. These mistakes can make a product strategy incoherent, excessively expensive, and ineffective. How we talk about what we choose to do sets our teams up for success. Or failure. Unpacking Three Ideas There […]
Estimating with ranges requires a level of transparency which may be uncomfortable because you are acknowledging what you don’t know. Doing this, however, cascades into multiple positive consequences. This is also a necessary component of outcome orientation. Using Problem Statements to Make Choices I talk about using problem statements to […]
Product management is fundamentally a discipline of decision-making. Which investments to make, which problems to solve, which customers to serve, etc. The approach we take to decisions is fraught with peril, and we benefit from removing unconscious biases – improving our ability to elegantly make decisions to improve and advance […]
Quantifying the impact of your problems puts them in perspective. It also exposes the assumptions you’re making, creating a virtuous cycle helping you to improve your framing of the problems, and making it possible to prioritize among them. When you first start to describe a problem, you may skip the […]
Good product management is understanding the problems your customers want to solve, how your customers get value from solving those problems, and figuring out how best to help them. We need a little help to actually understand those problems from the customer’s point of view. Even good product managers will […]
There is more to identifying who’s problem you’re trying to solve – you need to also have a sense for the context in which they experience the problem. Problem statements solve for someone, and good problem statements also solve for somewhen. The Situation The situation your customer finds themselves in […]
There’s a difference between who is exposed to a situation (many people) and who experiences that situation as a meaningful problem they would like to solve (a select few). It is important to not describe a situation as self-evidently bad, but rather to reshape your framing to discuss the problem […]