Defining the Problems

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In my previous article, I shared an improved template for writing problem statements. Knowing a good structure is necessary, but you also need to avoid filling the good template with bad content.

Problem Statements Provide Purpose

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Every company competes in a dynamic market. Staying the course is drifting off course. When you don’t use problem statements to express your intent, there are no signals to help your organization stay on course. Your people lack clarity, and therefore make mistakes.

Problem Statements Shape Better Products

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The overwhelming emphasis I see in product organizations is on sequencing the execution of the product strategy over the upcoming quarters. Optimizing the product operations work to deliver a subpar product. There is little to no effort applied to shaping the product strategy. Problem statements should be used to shape […]

How To Make Your Product Special

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When evaluating a product, a customer may see the product as special, adequate, inadequate, or awful. What is uncomfortable for product teams is they have no control over how the customer sees the product. They only have influence. What teams need to learn is how to approach creating the product […]

Intuition Enables Problem Solving

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The shift from inside-out to outside-in is necessary to become more effective as a product development organization. We cannot build it and (expect) they will come. Here’s how to think about shifting from simply creating outputs to actually solving problems.

Orienting to Value

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Orienting to value – every team, every person does it differently.  How you orient to value limits how much value you can create.  People with a naive orientation can only scratch the surface, cogs in someone else’s machine; those with a refined orientation to value, well, there is no limit to what they can do.

Epic Problem Statement

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When solving complex problems at scale, we use epics, features, and stories to align, focus, and coordinate the work of multiple teams to achieve the objectives of our organizations.  An epic represents the investment decision to solve a tangible problem; a collection of epics together represent a broader investment decision […]

Motivated Reasoning and Validating Hypotheses

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In our continuing series on managing the risk in your backlog, we look at the risk of kidding ourselves. Specifically, we use cause and effect and hypotheses to identify the assumptions in our plans, but if we don’t do it the right way, we will lie to ourselves by validating […]