Topic
product management
- Forget estimates, start with appetite
In the latest issue of Building Blocks, I dove into Shape Up and its idea of setting the appetite for a project. Fundamentally, appetite inverts the question we begin with when planning a project. Instead of starting…
- The Gradient of User Value
Saw this from John Carmack today on X: Feedback beats planning. My plea at Meta was “No grand plans, follow the gradient of user value”. I love this. If you just keep persistently pushing up the gradient toward more v…
- Whats The Unit Of Impact
Ryan Singer calls out the different flavors of “impact”, and the need to be able to articulate the purpose for doing something:
- Anti Portfolio Theory of Product
Often you hear product teams talking about their roadmap in investor-like terms. Managing their upcoming initiatives like a financial portfolio, distributing their bets among things of various categories, sizes, and r…
- Notes on Operating Well
Sam Gerstenzang wrote an excellent piece a couple weeks ago with operating lessons for growing companies, driven by his learnings from the product team at Stripe. Personally, I've got a decade or so of experience as a…
- Framing and Shape Up
With Shape Up, the process of "shaping" new product takes investment to really understand and communicate an idea. But in the process, this precedes the "pitch", the step where the team reviews a shaped concept and bu…
- Product is Hard
I linked a couple weeks ago to a piece from Marty Cagan. That led me to this talk that covers a lot of his thoughts on approaching product issues. Wide ranging and thought provoking stuff for product managers.
- Pre-Announcing as a Strategy
If you're in any line of product management or product development, you'll be familiar with the argumentation process around defining the product launch. The concept of a "pre-announcement" is something as old as the…
- Entering Product Development: Geodexy
I started with the first post in this series back in January, describing my own entrance into product development and management. When I joined the company we were in the very early stages of building a data collectio…
- Starting in Product Management
This is a brief series for those interested in getting into product management, in four parts. This first post is about how I got into this line of work and the beliefs I’ve formed over the years on the discipline. En…
- Weekend Reading: Railway Logos, Meditation, and the Next Feature Fallacy
🔩 The Next Feature Fallacy The vast majority of features won’t bend the curve. These metrics are terrible, and the Next Feature Fallacy strikes because it’s easy to build new features that don’t target the important…
- Right-sizing and Product Scoping
In product teams you’re continually faced with the challenge of scoping. When you build something directly for a customer, for a fee (consulting), the scoping process is explicit and has built-in constraints — custome…
- Economics & Product Management
A continuous challenge in product development (perhaps the ultimate challenge) is the balancing of many wants and needs with an inability to have everything. You never have the resources to build everything you want i…
- A Product Origin Story
Fulcrum, our SaaS product for field data collection, is coming up on its 7th birthday this year. We’ve come a long way: from a bootstrapped, barely-functional system at launch in 2011 to a platform with over 1,800 cus…