The weekly curated resources list for
Product professionals
The weekly curated resources list for
Product professionals
Receive a hand picked list of the best reads on building products that matter every week. Curated by Anders Toxboe. Published every Tuesday.
The best resources on Product Discovery.
Continuous discovery is all the rage—but what is it, why is it popular, and where does it fall down?
OKRs are the tactical implementation of managing to outcomes.
Jeff Gothelf just updated his Lean UX canvas.
When feature bloat can hurt more than help your business goals.
What is Jobs to be Done (JTBD)?
What would it take to change your mind? The default is the action you’re okay with falling into passively whereas the alternative action is something you need to be actively convinced to do.
Spend enough time talking with entrepreneurs, product people, designers, and anyone charged with proving something, and youll bump into questions about validation. How do you validate if its going to work? How do you know if people will buy it to not? How do you validate product market fit? How do you validate if a feature is ...
It’s all too easy for product teams to prioritize more experiments and interviews in search of the one “correct” insight that will unlock their product discovery. Product teams need to consider the context of their insights.
"AI is quite possibly the most important – and best – thing our civilization has ever created, certainly on par with electricity and microchips, and probably beyond those."– by Marc Andreessen
Core problems should have a higher priority for product managers than remote problems.
Product discovery doesn't just happen. One has to cast the net of dedicated research to catch ideas. Ideas in the waiting.
Dont ask, cant tell: Asking people what theyd pay for and how much rarely works
One-pagers communicate the data, insights, and beliefs behind potential bets.
An Unprecedented Situation
Think about this. Our behavior is different when we are alone compared to when we are surrounded by people. Why? Because then our subconscious alert reminds us the social rules and standards we should follow. We become aware of what is expected from us as social beings.
Have you been endlessly defending why it takes 9 months to design and launch a product with no guarantee of success? Think again.
Programming is about building products that solve problems for users not about writing beautiful code for its own sake.
The origin story of Sony Walkman, Mini Cooper, and the iPhone. "A tape recorder that didn't record", "resistance and the shock of the new", and "too expensive to do well in the market".
How to ask the right product discovery questions
Base your assumptions on various sources and dont believe in one A/B experiment to decide in which direction you want to go next.
How to run a Discovery Track
Good product discovery requires discovering opportunities as well as discovering solutions
Normally the question I focus on in my work and in my writing is How can we leverage the best practices of the very best companies in order to give ourselves the very best chance for continuous innovation?
Smoke testing is a simple way to check the most important aspect of a product: that it works. This guide will introduce you to its best practices.
Answer: Continuously - throughout the product development cycle.
Why focusing on qualitative research early in your new product role can fast-track your understanding of your customers, product, and their pain points, ultimately validating your current strategy and making you more effective sooner:
Redefine what facilitate means
There is no silver bullet for Product Discovery, but opportunity solution trees have become invaluable to structure and address some of the most complex business problems, while at the same time ensuring there is an outcome-focused approach across the entire organization.
A Heuristics-based Scorecard For Opportunity Evaluation
The Problem Is Focusing on the Solution
Marty Cagan: Agile and Lean Wont Solve all Your Problems
Enter Product Discovery...
Varying Scopes and Why They Matter
The most effective interviews center around open questions, which encourage the customer to share their stories and let us sit back and listen, keying in on (and responding to) details that take us in a useful direction.
Here's how to utilize it as a tool to build better products from day one.
1) Share power, 2) Prioritize relationships, 3) Leverage Heterogeneity, 4) Legitimize All Ways of Knowing, and 5) Prototype Early and Often.
A Customer Forces Story describes the causal forces that shape a customers journey as they hire a specific product to get a job done and move from an initial triggering event to some resolution event, like acquisition, activation, or cancellation.
Enhance your design skills by developing your ability to listen actively, empathetically, and with intention.
Solving pain points is not enough
How to prevent costly mistakes by learning what you don't know, now.
Good discovery is continuous. The day we stop being curious about our customers is the day our competitors start catching up.
A tremendously important article by Marty Cagan about dev teams, feature teams, and actually empowered product teams.
Are you doing real Product Discovery? If youre a product leader and recognize your companys approach in any of these anti-patterns, I hope this post will provide language to characterize the problem and guidance on fixing it.
Your job is to come up with solutions – not to say no
If we want to truly be outcome-oriented, we need to communicate the intent.
If you use the MVP framework, youre still faced with a big challenge- what exactly constitutes a viable product?
Vision and strategy are foundational pieces without which even a good product cannot withstand the weight of its market.
The road to scale: How long does it usually take to go through all four stages and what type of investment fits every stage?
It shouldn't be set in stone. What matters is the value you provide to your customers.
The types of questions we ask (and how we ask them) are the compass of the interview process, guiding the trip in directions most useful to our topic of inquiry (or at the very least preventing us from going in circles).
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More from Agile Insider
When you’re building an audience-centric and community-first business, you’re delaying finding your business idea and building your product for as long as possible. First, you look into your market, validate the existence of a budget, and zero in on a critical problem to which people need a solution.
How do you come up with fresh, transformative ideas?
Letting them know you've heard what they said.
A Tale of two Brands: bankrupt Gibson Guitars and thriving Fender Guitars.
The problem with business plans is that the expectation is to implement them.
A Scorecard-Based approach to Opportunity Evaluation
Short and recurring discovery cycles are better than long discovery phases.
Here's your checklist for Evaluating Experiments
Identify your riskiest assumption, find the smallest possible experiment to test that assumption, and use the results of the experiment to course correct.
If you’re a product leader and recognize your company’s approach in any of these, I hope this post will provide language to characterize the problem and guidance on fixing it.
Why Startups that Survive are Learning Organizations
How good ideas get stopped in their tracks
Business agility is not a specific methodology or even a general framework.
Use dot voting to whittle a list from lots to some. Use experiments to evaluate the smaller set.
There are two kinds of work, and there's no way around it: Discovery Delivery
A hierarchy to make your product profitable
It takes practice for a team to move beyond the feature factory.
Greater Goods v. Passable Products.
How do you know if the features you release are leading to positive business outcomes?
Product research needs to be timely, actionable, and believable for a product team to act upon it. Tweet This
Break down of what makes a good decision and what we can do to improve our decision-making processes.
Innovation strategy is about more than tackling whats in front of you. You have to know how to find, and manipulate, the advantages of hidden markets.
Receive a hand picked list of the best reads on building products that matter every week. Curated by Anders Toxboe. Published every Tuesday.