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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.