Weblog Archives

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Think Systems, not Symptoms (Dec 15, 2024): Piecemeal process creation frustrates teams and slows work. Stop patching problems and start solving systems. Adopting a systems thinking approach helps you design processes that are efficient, aligned with goals, and truly add value.
Your Policies Aren’t Your Culture (Dec 13, 2024): Policies guide behavior, but culture is the lived norms and values of your team. Policies reflect culture -- they don’t define it. Netflix’s parental leave shift didn’t change its culture of freedom and responsibility. It clarified how to live it.
Lighten Your Process Burden (Dec 7, 2024): Everyone hates oppressive processes, but somehow we keep managing to create them.
Product Add-Ons Are An Expansion Myth (Dec 1, 2024): Add-ons can enhance your product’s appeal but won’t drive significant market growth. To expand your customer base, focus on developing standalone products.
Protecting your Product Soul when the Same Product meets New People. (Nov 23, 2024): Expand into new markets while preserving your product’s core value. Discover how to adapt and grow without losing your product’s soul.
Building the Next Big Thing: A Framework for Your Second Product (Nov 19, 2024): You need a first product sooner than you think. Here's a framework for helping you identify a winner.
A Framework for Scaling product teams (Oct 9, 2024): The people, processes, and systems that make up a product organization change radically as you go through the stages of a company. This framework will guide that scaling.
My Networked Webcam Setup (Sep 25, 2024): A writeup of my network-powered conference call camera setup.
Roadmap Outcomes, not Features (Sep 4, 2024): Drive success by roadmapping the outcomes you'll create instead of the features you'll deliver.
Different roadmaps for different folks (Sep 2, 2024): The key to effective roadmapping? Different views for different needs.
Micromanaging and competence (Jul 2, 2024): Providing feedback or instruction can be seen as micromanagement unless you provide context.
My productivity operating system (Jun 24, 2024): A framework for super-charging productivity on the things that matter.
Great product managers own the outcomes (May 14, 2024): Being a product manager means never having to say, "that's not my job."
Too Big To Fail (Apr 9, 2024): When a company piles resources on a new product idea, it doesn't have room to fail. But failing is an important part of innovation. If you can't let it fail, it can't succeed.
Go small (Apr 4, 2024): The strengths of a large organization are the opposite of what makes innovation work. Starting something new requires that you start with a small team.
Start with a Belief (Apr 1, 2024): You can't use data to build products unless you start with a hypothesis.
Mastery doesn't come from perfect planning (Dec 21, 2023): In a ceramics class, one group focused on a single perfect dish, while another made many with no quality focus. The result? A lesson in the value of practice over perfection.
The Dark Side of Input Metrics (Nov 27, 2023): Using input metrics in the wrong way can cause unexpected behaviors, stifled creativity, and micromanagement.
Reframe How You Think About Users of your Internal Platform (Nov 13, 2023): Changing from "Customers" to "Partners" will give you a better perspective on internal product development.
Measuring Feature success (Oct 17, 2023): You're building features to solve problems. If you don't know what success looks like, how did you decide on that feature at all?
How I use OKRs (Oct 13, 2023): A description of how I use OKRs to guide a team, written so I can send to future teams.
Build the whole product (Oct 6, 2023): Your code is only part of the product
Input metrics lead to outcomes (Sep 1, 2023): An easy to understand example of using input metrics to track progress toward an outcome.
Lagging Outcomes (Aug 22, 2023): Long-term things often end up off a team's goals because they can't see how to define measurable outcomes for them. Here's how to solve that.
Tyranny of Outcomes (Aug 19, 2023): An extreme focus on outcomes can have an undesired effect on product teams.