“Do you want to win arguments or solve problems?” - Rory Sutherland

You’ve gotta love this quote from Rory Sutherland.

With so much noise in the product industry today, it couldn’t be more relevant.

You don’t need to go far to see comments like "that's not real product management", "that's not agile" or [insert practice X].

While I do believe there’s a place for inspiration and increasing our exposure to what’s possible.

It’s not going to solve any problems.

Deploy = is the process of making software available on a target environment. This could be a production environment, but it also might not be.

Release = is still a technical activity, but it’s where you make the newly deployed changes available to your users.

Launch = is a strategic activity (non-technial) where you inform the market about specific features and changes.

Last week, over 300 passionate product people joined me live for a free webinar on ‘Building Effective Product Roadmaps’ (the recording is below).

I want to share the results of the polls I ran during the webinar and figured, why not do a summary of the key points too.

Let’s get into it!

From my experience, there are two common reasons why I see product backlogs become long and unmanageable.

​A lack of strategy​ and, therefore, backlogs become a dumping ground for any and every idea.

Working big, breaking down big solutions, rather than breaking down the outcome (refer to ​my last post​)

A common pattern I see in many of the product teams and companies I coach is that they’re doing a lot of incremental work but little-to-no iterations.

They have this big idea (often framed as an initiative) and become solely focused on breaking it down. The initiative becomes a series of epics, and that epic becomes a series of user stories, and so forth.

A common challenge organizations face as they scale or when they go down the product transformation route is clarifying roles.

Either it’s caused by the introduction of new roles, like Product Marketing Managers, Growth Product Managers, etc, or having to rebaseline existing roles, like how we think about the Product Manager role.

Quick one from me this week. Instead of a typical post I thought I’d share some of the stuff I’ve been busy with like last week’s Webinar

There are several different ways to price and monetize your PLG products. The most common are free trials and the freemium model, but you also have reverse trials, sandboxes, and proxies.

I love product newsletters! I really got to see what good looks like several years ago while working at a globally distributed company. We had offices and product teams all around the world. Every month, we would send out an internal newsletter to the whole organization, giving an update on what each product team was working on.

80% of features are never or rarely used. The best Product Companies known this which is why last year, Spotify announced it would be sunsetting Spotify Live, Medium sunset their Profiles and Themes, and Airbnb has hit paused on Experiences to focus on their core offering.

Companies that move fast make decisions fast.

What takes one company a week, they do in a day. Compound that over time, and it’s a landslide.

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’ve all heard the saying, “if you try to please everyone, you please no one.” This is especially true for startups and new products. Focus and being able to find a niche can be a huge unlock for products.

A comprehensive guide to conducting user interviews covering: 1) How to structure a user interview for maximum impact and 2) How to design better questions to elicit high-quality responses.

I heard someone once say "the level of conflict you're willing to endure will be the level of change you inflict". 

This really stuck with me over the years and I come back to this notion regularly.

Jeff Bezos once said in an interview with Forbes "Friends congratulate me after a quarterly-earnings announcement and say, 'Good job, great quarter.' And I'll say, 'Thank you, but that quarter was baked three years ago.'" As the saying goes, "It takes 10 years to be an overnight success"

If we can all agree that the outcome is important, not the output (i.e. a feature) then we shouldn't consider any item of work as 'done' until it's created the desired outcome.

We are told that great Product Managers are great storytellers but the preaching often lacks actionable guidance on how to become good at storytelling. It’s time to change that!

Building products is messy, uncertain, and non-linear. I’ve always found trying to explain this to someone who hasn’t experienced it difficult.

KPIs = measures of health. OKRs = things we want to change.