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 Roadmapping.
If your company is making strategic decisions based on Figjam sticker voting, something is fundamentally broken about your team’s vision.
Everyone gets excited about launching new features, but most of a company’s growth comes from the less glamorous stuff: incremental and consistent optimization of the core product.
The product landscape has changed. Its time our product development process changes with it.
When the prescriptive, feature-centric product roadmap is gone, What do your teams do first?
Running experiments for your product and business can be overwhelming, but there are ways to manage the process by following three simple principles.
Responsibility vs Accountability The Trust Paradox of Self-Organising Teams
Teams are given something to build and the expectation is that they deliver this exact thing in a timely fashion.
A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.
The most common potholes to avoid when creating long term plans
There are three techniques that leaders can employ to develop insights: Look at customers and startups for signs of changeExperience new technologies rather than just read about themPractice associative thinking, which means connect two seemingly disparate concepts to develop a novel idea.
If the output of your Discovery is a Design, then you're doing Waterfall agile, and you're probably a feature team...
Is this work still valuable?
But how do we find what not to build?
Why are we pretending like we know what well be doing in 6 months?
Most companies are looking for outcomes, unfortunately the majority of what they get is output
With a clear timeline, milestones, dates and scope-based commitments stakeholders can answer When will it be done? and When can we start selling it to our customers?... right?
Building solutions collaboratively is impossible if youre getting feature requests from stakeholders and executing on those requests.
What makes a vision compelling?
Have you been endlessly defending why it takes 9 months to design and launch a product with no guarantee of success? Think again.
Here's how to safely learn/practice product even if your org feels like an irreformable feature factory.
The Shortcomings of the Impact/Effort Matrix – there’s something easily graspable that everyone understands in a 4x4 quadrant, and the ease of use is not something that should be underestimated. Yet, I am not sure that the two axes we have been using are the best ones to steer a conversation about priorities.
Marty Cagan: Feature teams don't need PMs Ben Erez: Here's why feature team PMs are real PMs
How to manage the goal lifecycle and steer towards business and user outcomes rather than place bets on unproven ideas.
A new infrastructure paradigm, purpose-built for AI, is emerging to supercharge the next wave of enterprise data software in the age of AI.
You can't experiment your way out of every product problem!
Good planning starts top-down, but when thats not possible, plan bottom-up without losing sight of the bigger picture. Heres how.
Prevent your company from wasting time and money on poor opportunities understand what will be required to succeed with good opportunities.
When figuring out what to build is as important as the building process
How to run a Discovery Track
Don’t create a process just for the sake of process. Implement the process that works best for your company.
A treatise on how to maintain team morale and motivation in the face of overwhelming odds – why "Ruthless Prioritization" doesn't work.
Taking an incremental approach can de-risk your innovation effort.
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 tool to assist product managers in navigating the various activities required to create and deploy a product strategy. The canvas is structured into two distinct parts: one for product strategy creation and one for deployment.
Whether product roadmaps should have dates has attracted much debate in product management. Some people passionately argue that dates should be banned from roadmaps. Others claim that they are
Product Management is like using Google Maps Imagine you want to go somewhere. You open the app, enter your destination, let it assess your current location, and it calculates a series of steps to get you to where you want to go.
On how to move faster and stop throwing away your product roadmaps
If youre not adding things back in at least 10% of the time, youre clearly not deleting enough. Elon Musk
Learn how you can leverage a portfolio roadmap to align a product portfolio and state the specific outcomes it should achieve.
The product roadmap is a popular product management tool that communicates how a product is likely to evolve. But despite its popularity, its not always applicable. In this article, I share three
A Heuristics-based Scorecard For Opportunity Evaluation
Thin Slicing is where you build a minimal (but robust) strand of end-to-end functionality to prove something can work, and you then iteratively add to it in pursuit of a measurable goal.
OKR require agility to succeed. The basics of Scrum provide the exact right scaffolding for this.
A Product Vision tells the story and paints the picture of an ideal product experience which solves for the sweet spot between user and business impact. This article provides a process and storytelling framework to bring a vision to life.
Theres never been a better time to act on your big idea. And this manifesto will show you how.
Your OKRs dont live in a vacuum.Yet this is exactly how I see many organizations treat their OKRs.They jump on the bandwagon and create OKRs void of any context.Heres what I see all the time
But how do we find what not to build?
Invaluable lessons for anyone looking to innovate and build beloved products.
Stop talking past each other. Translate between the three "languages" of customer desires, product features, and business goals.
MVP is not only for startups applying an MVP Razor to every feature you build can save you time and resources. Lets explore examples.
Learn how to foster a culture of experimentation. Explore the experimentation lifecycle, practical tips, and the importance of embracing failure to drive innovation and growth.
This post is brought to you by: Eppo. Eppo is a next-generation A/B testing platform trusted by Growth teams at companies like Twitch, DraftKings, Perplexity, and Coinbase. Teams who use Eppo see 10x experiment velocity across marketing, product, and AI use cases.
Your product can be described in 2 words as [adjective] + [noun] Example "electric car" or "smart phone" or similar. But..."horseless carriage" just turns into "car." (which then invites a new adjective-led category later)
Resolve decision-making conflicts by selecting the right approach: Make a bold choice, synthesize a new solution, or find the balance.
It encourages new ideas. It focuses on learning. It frees up resources. It reduces risk at every stage. It is a great sanity check on your strategy.
Most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in ten years.
How to get your team on the same page and agreeing on the roadmap
When you try to be agile and lean, but you keep using waterfall development techniques.
If we want to truly be outcome-oriented, we need to communicate the intent.
Features are not vertical groupings of user stories. They must be designed so they either serve internal functions or drive customer experiences; they must be outcome focused.
Why Business Outcomes Are Often Assigned to Product Teams
Its important to distinguish badly designed experiences and processes from actual design debt.
A startup’s greatest limitation is time, and product planning is, at best, a luxury. But without product planning, there is chaos, mistakes, and rework. Here’s how to build a product roadmap at a startup that aligns with your company’s goals
A common pattern is doing a lot of incremental work but little-to-no iterations. Following a big idea (often framed as an initiative) and being solely focused on breaking it down often leads to a series of epics, and that epic becomes a series of user stories, and so forth.
You’ve made it down the long and winding road to product-market fit and found greener pastures ahead. But there’s still more hard work to do — the pressure to grow drums on.
Frameworks seem to get a lot of hate. They often bear the brunt of blame when projects go off the rails. But is it really the framework’s fault, or is there something else going on?
Old backlogs can be the place where ideas go to die. But they can also be a treasure trove of feedback from your customers.
From directing product teams with tasks to making the team investigate solutions to goals
Learn the first step of turning that data into an actual product.
Customer journey maps are a great way to understand users' problems, assess what you're doing well (or not), figure out where to focus and what to track and more.
I cringe every time I see product teams use a spreadsheet to rank the ideas in their backlog...
If the uncertainty you face is too high, start with product discovery and not with product delivery.
Planning work in a linear, visual way is tempting. But traditional roadmaps betray the true nature of software development.
It takes practice for a team to move beyond the feature factory.
Moving away from a GANTT chart of features and dates
Software is an uncertain medium. Its a continuous medium. This means there is no end to it, you cant predict its end state and you really have no idea what combination of code, copy and design will deliver the customer success (outcomes) youre seeking.
Simply take them out and theyre ready to use with all your devices. Put them in your ears and they connect immediately, immersing you in rich, high-quality sound.
When we achieve a level of understanding such that the situation no longer appears complex, we can exercise logic and intuition effectively.
If youve heard the term dual-track development before, this article explains where it comes from, and what it means. Here are the key points:
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of John Doerrs OKR Book
Heres how to actually do it
Receive a hand picked list of the best reads on building products that matter every week. Curated by Anders Toxboe. Published every Tuesday.