Is Your Process Your Purpose?

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A common suggestion from product development teams when asked how to improve their working environment, is to “spend less time in meetings.” I’ve felt this way personally when I was writing code – I just wanted to get back to it. I don’t believe I’ve worked with an organization where […]

Minimum Valuable Problem

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Defining and building a good minimum viable product is much harder than it sounds. Finding that “one thing” you can do, which people want, is really about a lot more than picking one thing. It is a combination of solving the minimum valuable problem and all of the other things […]

Opposite Views of a Product Roadmap

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Your product roadmap is a view of what you are building right now, in the near future, and in the more distant future. Or is your roadmap a view of why you are building whatever you’re building right now, in the near future, and in the more distant future? Your […]

Whole Product Game

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How can Theodore Levitt’s classic Whole Product approach help with defining a product roadmap? I’ve been revisiting his concepts and their use recently, thinking about how to revise them for some exercises I’ve been doing with product teams.

The Conversation Economy

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The industrial age is behind us. It was surpassed by the knowledge economy, rapidly evolved into the attention economy. Successful companies realize that attention comes as a result of conversation. We’re now in the conversation economy.

Pictures and Ideas for Powerful Whitepapers

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Pictures can convey messages much more powerfully than words. In a recent discussion about writing whitepapers, I suggested combining the idea-creation advice from Made To Stick with the image-creation advice from Back of The Napkin. Check out this article to see some concrete examples.

First Impressions

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We spend a lot of time (rightly) on the capabilities of our products – identifying valuable problems and compelling solutions. This focus is ideal for addressing the needs of our users. But what if people abandon our products before trying them? First impressions matter – both for buyers and users.

Stakeholders in a Barrel

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There’s really only one way to travel down a waterfall – in a barrel. A lot of people died this way, but some survived. Software projects have been predominantly waterfall projects since the start of software projects. And stakeholders rode down those projects, basically in a barrel. The people riding […]