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 Team dynamics.
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.
One of the best ways for product teams to follow your vision is by articulating your products design principles
Running experiments for your product and business can be overwhelming, but there are ways to manage the process by following three simple principles.
How to Grow an Agile Product Team
Why limiting work in progress can increase flow and value in product development
Make Decisions Based on Learning
A comprehensive list of the best pieces startup advice there is
Responsibility vs Accountability The Trust Paradox of Self-Organising Teams
'Two weeks is simply not enough time to actually accomplish anything meaningful.'
A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.
We are all aware of the term, emotional intelligence, for its a quality that many product leaders believe is key to building trust and establishing positive connections with colleagues and
Feature teams are not innately wrong, and that “feature factory” PMs are real PMs doing important work.
Give people the resources and bandwidth to test out new ideas. Innovation and the freedom to experiment go hand-in hand.
How everything youve learned about being a leader can work against you when creating a culture of experimentation.
AI could just replace a product manager all together –but to begin with: make it much more fun
Building solutions collaboratively is impossible if youre getting feature requests from stakeholders and executing on those requests.
The Pinterest Growth team has over 100 members, and weve run thousands of experiments over the years. Its difficult to run that many experiments and still maintain a high success rate over time
Agree on Working Norms: 5 Ways to Help Your Product Team Thrive
Have you been endlessly defending why it takes 9 months to design and launch a product with no guarantee of success? Think again.
Product ops is a new and rapidly growing field within the tech industry. Product ops professionals are responsible for the planning, coordination, and execution of product development projects.
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.
Recognize that Your Job is to Solve Problems & Create Value
Here's how to safely learn/practice product even if your org feels like an irreformable feature factory.
What role do they play? What role does my initiative or idea have in their lives? What level of experience do they have with the subject matter? What language do they use?
Mature code-generation technology, coupled with advanced generative AI image models, has shortened the journey from idea to fully operational application.
Words like empowered, feature factory, and outcome-oriented are squishy and can mean a million things. Behaviors don't lie (provided you make it safe for people to share reality). There are only so many hours in a week, and we have finite energy to do thoughtful work.
Marty Cagan: Feature teams don't need PMs Ben Erez: Here's why feature team PMs are real PMs
Good planning starts top-down, but when thats not possible, plan bottom-up without losing sight of the bigger picture. Heres how.
Great engineers leave when they are no longer excited by an opportunity.
When figuring out what to build is as important as the building process
How the people behind the roles that shape your world think.
Apply lessons from Wargames to shape overall vision, communicate effectively and ship products successfully.
Following recipes is the beginning of your agile transformation. To reach true agility you must become a chef.
The uique challenges of managing product managers: the 4 steps to fnding management equilibrium
UX teams must be integrated in the AI model training process.
Product designers and product managers are critical partners in building and improving the product. Here's a guide to getting it to work.
Learn five ways internal product managers can utilize product analytics data to make better, data-driven decisions.
Product leadership is a challenging role because you are expected to lead but dont have the authority to decide on your own. Its not trivial, but the right mindset can do wonders. Here are a few tricks to get you there.
Like it or not, managing up is not just about building a relationship with your boss. It’s also your bosses boss, stakeholders, team members, peers and beyond. While your relationship with your boss is extremely important, it’s just one of many that will impact your future growth.
Two contrasting viewpoints on how to design product teams, exploring how to optimize team structures for enhanced collaboration and efficiency.
A tool for building innovative teams
Innovation comes from those closest to the products.
How to progress from covering the foundations to becoming an exceptional PM.
How using all of design thinking, agile, and lean means we can build better products.
Accountability and responsibility, two words often used interchangeably but carry vastly different implications particularly when it comes to culture and cultivating trust and autonomous teams.
How to create a structure that gave teams enough flexibility to be creative, while living with corporate constraints.
This article is certain to upset many people.
Most people doing tech today, whether they have a technical background or a business background, probably have a services mindset rather than a product mindset. Why is this ingrained mindset important to understand when you are operating in the product world?
Thanks to Tony Santos and Melanie Hambarsoomian.
OKR require agility to succeed. The basics of Scrum provide the exact right scaffolding for this.
Having at least one team member fully dedicated to growth creates ownership and helps ensuring the process will remain in a continuous and permanent manner.
A framework for a collaborative approach between product managers and developments, key to a successful product development.
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.
Theres never been a better time to act on your big idea. And this manifesto will show you how.
Stop talking past each other. Translate between the three "languages" of customer desires, product features, and business goals.
How to avoid the "feature factory" trap and create products customers love with insights on empowering teams and fostering collaboration.
A product team is a cross-functional group whose members work together to achieve product success. Most people would agree that the person in charge of the product, a UX designer, and one or more.Bring the right people on boardSecure the right commitmentGet the right support
RICE can be easily manipulated
Opportunities for collaboration improvement between product managers and product designers.
One of your primary responsibilities as a leader is to create clarity.
Study interviewed 20 growth leads to help you answer how to build your organization around growth
How to get your team on the same page and agreeing on the roadmap
Latest from me on how to make experimentation a repeatable leanstartup
When you try to be agile and lean, but you keep using waterfall development techniques.
The very properties that make Agile so powerful for teams to produce better quality outcomes for business are precisely those properties that make it resistant.
Think you can keep your good old matrix organisation and simply rename it to "The Spotify Model"? Think again!
Why Business Outcomes Are Often Assigned to Product Teams
To better understand the different nature of growth teams compared to other departments in the organization, we first need to clear up what's the difference between an outcome and an output. Some
Clearing up roles & creating a new norm together
Are we witnessing the first signs of a post-Scrum era?
Product lead Peter Yang taps into his decade-plus career to explain why staying focused on the craft is a product managers superpower.
Learn what a product trio is, the benefits of working this way, who should be responsible for what in a trio, and much more.
Occasionally, people ask me if there are any alternatives to the PMwheel. While I have a strong bias toward the PMwheel (I created it, after all!), Ive begun to compile a list of other product manager assessment resources that are out there.
Marina Chernyshova, a Senior Product Designer, highlights the opportunities for collaboration improvement between product managers and product designers.
Product managers have the responsibility, but not the authority to deliver product results, so influence often becomes a key to success.
To ensure design thinking really works, leaders must provide a clear direction.
From directing product teams with tasks to making the team investigate solutions to goals
Short and recurring discovery cycles are better than long discovery phases.
The right path to getting teams to reset and rethink their approach to growth is easier than it sounds.
Have we reached the point where agile-or-not has proven to be a false dichotomy?
None of this can happen without a dedicated designer assigned to the scrum team.
There's no one-size-fits-all growth advice. Brian Rothenberg, former VP of Growth at Eventbrite, breaks down the three broad phases of the startup lifecycle. For each phase, he identifies key targets that startups should aim for to kick their growth strategy to the next level.
A step-by-step guide to becoming a great Product Manager: A Learning Path to help aspiring and growing Product Managers break into the role and level up.
Understand and improve your decision making and avoid getting stuck in analysis paralysis.
Paradox: You typically have the most impact in your career when you are learning the least, and you tend to learn the most when you are least effective.
Your product transformation will fail if you treat a transformation as a project. The track record for big projects is not good. The track record for formal transformation efforts is also not good.
"We won't be renewing this year."Those were the scary words of a decision-maker at a large conglomerate to our CEO one fine afternoon. It came as a surprise. The week prior, the customer success rep managing the account was confident about landing an expansion deal with them for our applicant tracking software.The 6 frictions points are:Conflict around the boundaries and ownership of each roleProduct marketers complain about not being a part of the product strategy and the roadmapSudden changes to launch dates can make life difficult for Product MarketersPMs find PMMs miss the point by focusing on hype and jargon-filled messagingProduct managers and Product marketers thinking about the ICP in different waysProduct managers and marketers aren’t aligned on the importance of features and the launch intensity they deserve.
And product coaching is how we get there.
The Process is the Product
How to stand up for for long-term interests of the company and its target customers.
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.
Business agility is not a specific methodology or even a general framework.
There are two kinds of work, and there's no way around it: Discovery Delivery
Marty Cagan: OKRs are a waste of time if you doing feature teams (instead of product teams).
A Partnership, not a Battlefield. What high performing Product Teams actually look like
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:
Beyond the Usual OKR approach Since I first started writing about OKRs seven years ago, I have had a lot of companies reach out to me for advice. OKRs were originally envisioned to create focus on
It's not just about pitching ideas well – you've also got to prepare a soft landing for them
Truly agile teams enjoy the ability, desire and safety to respond to change over following a plan.
When people over-optimize on the practices rather than letting the best principles guide their thought process, they limit their options for achieving success.
How everything youve learned about being a leader can work against you when creating a culture of experimentation. Chances are, you jumped in way over your head and learned as much as possible, as
Sketching Helps You Think
In every company, there are invariably more problems than people have the time to deal with. At best, this results in circumstances where minor issues are overlooked. At worst, ongoing firefighting depletes the resources available to an operation.
And how to run great product team meetings.
Stop fighting fires... Easy to say, hard to do. Right?
Receive a hand picked list of the best reads on building products that matter every week. Curated by Anders Toxboe. Published every Tuesday.