Which is the bigger risk for your product right now? Shipping with a feature your customers don’t value? Or delaying your release in order to ship with something they do value?
Prioritization / Product Management
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Sequencing the Solving of Problems
Most people and teams conflate prioritizing and sequencing of work. Prioritization is the process of deciding what is important to do, and sequencing is deciding what order to do it in. Shaping a product strategy involves both. First you decide which problems are important to solve. Then you decide which […]
Product Management / Product Ops
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Feeding Your Business Case
Product strategy manifests as a collection of bets, investment decisions to do something or not, to do things now or later. A business case requires you to compare the predicted costs with the expected benefits. Your problem statement must articulate the expected benefit in economic terms to support your decision […]
Product Management / Product Ops
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Stunting Collaboration Before It Can Begin
Your process can prevent collaboration. The language you use in your problem statements can stop collaboration too. When you use proxy variables instead of economic measures of outcome you prevent your teams from collaborating and you reduce the likelihood of achieving product success.
Product Management / Product Strategy
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The Wrong Measure Will Misdirect You
When deciding what to measure, we often choose metrics which sound good or metrics which are easy. These mistakes can make a product strategy incoherent, excessively expensive, and ineffective. How we talk about what we choose to do sets our teams up for success. Or failure.
Product Management / Product Ops / Product Strategy
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Uselessly Wide Estimation Ranges
Estimating with ranges requires a level of transparency which may be uncomfortable because you are acknowledging what you don’t know. Doing this, however, cascades into multiple positive consequences. This is also a necessary component of outcome orientation.
Product Management / Product Strategy
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Probabilistic Thinking in Problem Statements
Product management is fundamentally a discipline of decision-making. Which investments to make, which problems to solve, which customers to serve, etc. The approach we take to decisions is fraught with peril, and we benefit from removing unconscious biases – improving our ability to elegantly make decisions to improve and advance […]
Product Management / Product Strategy
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Problem Statement Impact and Assumptions
Quantifying the impact of your problems puts them in perspective. It also exposes the assumptions you’re making, creating a virtuous cycle helping you to improve your framing of the problems, and making it possible to prioritize among them.
Product Management / Product Ops
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Biasing with Problem Statements
Good product management is understanding the problems your customers want to solve, how your customers get value from solving those problems, and figuring out how best to help them. We need a little help to actually understand those problems from the customer’s point of view. Even good product managers will […]