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 Strategy.
OKRs are a way of expressing outcomes. Outcomes are the results of actions taken. Both business and product outcomes can be expressed as OKRs.
The story is far from over.
Discover the impact of prioritizing speed over perfection in product experimentation and the advantages of continuous iteration for better outcomes.
If your company is making strategic decisions based on Figjam sticker voting, something is fundamentally broken about your team’s vision.
Steve Blank: The three horizons are not bound by time. Horizon 3 ideas – disruption – can be delivered as fast as ideas for Horizon 1 – existing products.
How to figure out a plan for your product?
Most companies fall into the trap of thinking about Product Strategy as a plan to build certain features and capabilities.
When feature bloat can hurt more than help your business goals.
What is Jobs to be Done (JTBD)?
As product folks start sharpening up their annual plans, Nate Stewart, Chief Product Officer of Cockroach Labs unpacks his playbook for gaining conviction and creating a resilient strategy that’s still standing this time next year. 6 Common Failure Modes.
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 ...
Product vision isn’t setting revenue targets or creating a list of features you wished your product had. Vision is imagining a future world with your product in it and telling a story about how people will experience your product(s) in that future.
Tactics to grow gross margin
"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
From Duolingo to Snapchat to Wordle: an activity streak has the power to compel behavior, and marketers have taken note.
Many companies overestimate consumers appetite for sustainable products, flooding the market with offerings that dont sell well.
How business models drive product design and user behavior.
Explore key frameworks and real-world insights to navigate and calculate corporate innovation ROI effectively.
One pattern that holds companies back from nailing their positioning is having an overly pessimistic product thinking. This is where the team has decided that their product is an undifferentiated loser despite all evidence to the contrary.
The market itself is the result of what has happened.If you're a product manager and you've performed market research analysis, you will realise theres no one-size-fits-all approach.
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.
Find out how you can proactively respond to opportunities and threats and ensure that your product strategy is truly adaptive.
There is no way to succeed without talking to customers. But whenever I say that, people bring up the famous quote about faster horses. Whether the quote itself is authentic or not, you shouldnt take it as an excuse not to talk to your customers. Instead, you should know how to do so and what to ask. Here are the concepts that you need to be aware of.
A Radical Take on OKRs: Two Solutions for Better Goal Setting
Why your startup needs a minimum viable business plan, not a traditional one. How to adapt and refine your Minimum Viable Business Plan.
AI is a double-edged sword. On one hand, teams can move faster, validate ideas with precision, and make data-driven decisions.On the other hand, AI can reinforce biases and stifle creativity. For VPs of Innovation, the stakes are clear: adopt AI thoughtfully or risk mediocrity or even outright failure.
1. How can we assess the level of product sense in PMs, designers, and developers?
Everyones a maker –were seeing a wave of powerful no code tools enter the market.
AI could just replace a product manager all together –but to begin with: make it much more fun
Pricing is difficult in the early stages of a business. You have neither minimal information on the value your product provides nor your customers capacity to pay.
What makes a vision compelling?
You need to constantly be building for that next user that doesn’t have the same level of knowledge, intent, or needs that you, your team, and your power users already have.
Have you been endlessly defending why it takes 9 months to design and launch a product with no guarantee of success? Think again.
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".
Got it, now can we get practical?
Through this series, we will explore what, why, who, and how to do a Product Vision, going from the fundamentals to a workshop format that can help you create it for the first time.
The good news is we can change direction. The key to achieving this lies in outcome-based leadership a transformative approach that puts the customer at the heart of everything you do, while fostering a culture of autonomy and purpose within your teams.
This fresh take on "Willingness-to-Pay" analyzes three types of customer motivation, leading to superior strategies for growth that also better the world.
Learn how to move from long-term, North Star Metrics to actionable quarterly Key Results, with Product Strategy bridging the two.
Expansion can really come from only 1 of 4 places: 1) Growing your existing product in your current market. 2) Expanding your current product into new markets. 3) Creating new products for your current market, and 4) Creating new products for a new market
We all take many things as given. This perception defines how we think and operate. But many of the things that we see as objective constraints are actually choices we or someone else made along the way. Here is how to allow yourself to choose right.
Here's how to safely learn/practice product even if your org feels like an irreformable feature factory.
In the AI era, implementing robust policies, verification systems, and user education initiatives, platforms can foster trust and in an evolving landscape.
You can't experiment your way out of every product problem!
One pattern that holds companies back from nailing their positioning is an overly pessimistic product thinking. This is where the team has decided that their product is an undifferentiated loser despite all evidence to the contrary.
Learn what it takes to drive both individual and organizational success.
Here goes...A List of Initiatives is a StrategyYou can Prove that Your Strategy is CorrectAnalytically Strong People are Better StrategistsStrategy is a Zero-Sum GameStrategy is Formulated at the Top & then Executed Below
One of my most important lessons from years of working on WhatsApp is that simplicity isnt just a design choice its a competitive advantage.
Product success is a team sport - here's how to connect your product direction to the activities of your commercial teams & to the big picture of your organisation.
Some teams build like theyll never have to touch the system again. They charge ahead, hardcoding workflows, locking in decisions, and treating every feature like its the final word on the problemTech debt that isn't just technical...
“I feel like product management as a profession is going through product market fit collapse. What do we do?”
Prevent your company from wasting time and money on poor opportunities understand what will be required to succeed with good opportunities.
How the people behind the roles that shape your world think.
Success does not come from a god-given opinion smarter than everyone elses. Success is in our ability to recognize what we don't know, and in our ability to apply the scientific process to discover empirical truth.
Startups are more likely to find product/market fit by narrowing their target demographic, understanding customer needs/benefit better, and building more focused differentiated products.
4 key Principles for Enterprise Product Success
The traditional startup funnel is broken - by Ash Maurya
We’ve done everything right, we’ve user tested the site, had an open beta for users to test, we’ve A|B tested and it’s on par with the current version but our users HATE it, worst of all our CEO is ‘concerned’.
High-Growth Strategies for High-Risk Times
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.
Customer retention is at the center of every successful growth machine. To drive retention in a marketplace, it is critical to invest in supplier quality
Connecting Business, Product, and Technology Strategy
Product strategy is one of the most important responsibilities of the product leader. Its also one of the hardest. To succeed, you must be almost obsessed with it. Here are a few guidelines that will help you do so.
Spotify CPO Gustav Sderstrms leadership lessons and insights on integrating AI to build a personalized user experience
Accepting customer requests at face value can lead to naive product decisions. Here's what you should do instead.
One of the hardest challenges when setting goals is to find good ways to measure things that move slowly. This can take many form: Whenever you see a key result where the target is a single unit, it
Escaping the tyranny of incrementalism in product building
Product success is a team sport - here's how to connect your product direction to the activities of your commercial teams & to the big picture of your organisation.
Aggregated DAU/MAU might be good for slideshows, but its a bad way to measure user behaviour and product performance.
1) Share power, 2) Prioritize relationships, 3) Leverage Heterogeneity, 4) Legitimize All Ways of Knowing, and 5) Prototype Early and Often.
Breaking down the characteristics of a good product.
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.
BTW, once-a-year CEO fiat or a surprise unveiling from the top-secret strategy committee doesnt usually qualify. Strategy should be an all-year-round effort with lots of participation and (politely) heated arguments.
Product first is often business first.
Stop the dominance of marginal gains in product strategies, promoting a shift towards addressing product debt.
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
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.
How do we position a product that doesn't have any advantages over the alternatives? Let's start by entertaining the idea that maybe we're wrong about that.
Startup founders, listen up. There's a paradox at the heart of building a successful company that too many miss: to move fast, you need to start by thinking slow.
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.
Vision and strategy are foundational pieces without which even a good product cannot withstand the weight of its market.
A lesson from football on finding leading indicators in your data
Here’s how to de-risk it.
Why Business Outcomes Are Often Assigned to Product Teams
Its important to distinguish badly designed experiences and processes from actual design debt.
Traditional sales models focus on customer acquisition and the funnel or pipeline metrics that dominate talk about sales. But this approach falls short when applied to a recurring revenue business, where the customer life cycle looks more like a bowtie, not a funnel.
There is a lot of discussion of whether building a mere wrapper on top of GPT is defensible.
How B2B Product Management Drives Business Growth by Improving Customer Retention
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.
How giving something a name gives it powersometimes too much
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.
Dozens of founders have used this technique to transform the cash-flow of their businesses. Now it's your turn.
Does your company vision help you make decisions? Most dont. Here is why a clear ambitious vision is so important - and how you can create one.
Find out how the product lifecycle model helps you evolve the product strategy and achieve product success on a continued basis.
The two main business modalities are more different than you expect. When you hit PMF, it's a culture-shift to switch from one to the other.
In Engineering, quarterly OKRs (Objectives & Key Results) can feel like a duplication of product planning. Basically, they say "Ship the Roadmap." What new information are they communicating in that case? And if the OKRs say anything else, they're in conflict the roadmap! An example (that I made up): In Marketing, quarterly OKRs express our…
I learned that bias and opinion arent synonymous, and that data often isnt the complete picture you need to build great things.
Ever found yourself trapped in the relentless cycle of building features that sound brilliant in planning meetings but somehow miss the mark in the real world?
Agility is NOT measured in the amount of code we produce. Instead, its measured in the way we positively impact customer behavior (outcomes).
Move from tactical to strategic data with this strategic data analysis template
Interesting case study on using Teresa Torres' Opportunity-Solution Tree
Learn the first step of turning that data into an actual product.
Documenting your Product/Market Fit hypotheses
Learn how to express your startup vision with conviction.
Solve One Problem, For One Customer
Slack design: Product principles are essential guidelines that help teams evaluate work across functions
The best hacks and security research from Black Hat and Def Con 2024
The Process is the Product
Discuss validated customer insights and their impact on current and future product decisions.
Here's their formula: Its much better to have a couple of fast-moving teams duplicate effort than to have both of those teams lose days.
In software, design can be one of the most important levers of growth.
The act of deliberately defining how you are the best at something that a defined market cares a lot about.
When we achieve a level of understanding such that the situation no longer appears complex, we can exercise logic and intuition effectively.
Do things that dont scale in service of building things that do scale.
Truly agile teams enjoy the ability, desire and safety to respond to change over following a plan.
Control and Predictability in Corporate Strategy
Consumption isn’t just a revenue model; it is the explicit understanding that if we aren’t focusing every function in the company around making our customers successful, we aren’t living up to our commitments or our ability.
Receive a hand picked list of the best reads on building products that matter every week. Curated by Anders Toxboe. Published every Tuesday.