There’s an infamous bridge, known on the internet as the “11 foot 8” bridge or the “Canopener Bridge”. Here is a quick example of the bridge in question: I think our leadership abilities can similar to this bridge, in that they can limit us and our teams. And they can do so in a destructive …
Product Management
What is your product hypothesis?
What do you believe is true about your product that you’re actively trying to prove right now? Maybe it’s a new feature, a new subset of features, or even a whole new product, but you need to identify a hypothesis. The power in calling it a hypothesis, is that it declares to everyone around you …
Why is simplicity so hard?
Why do we produce such complicated products when most would with Ockham’s Razor that “entities should not be multiplied without necessity.” How do things end up so complex when we all want to have the simplest possible solution, design, or implementation that we can come up with? I believe there are a few reasons: What …
What is success?
As a product leader, we should never let our teams think success is just delivering a feature, because our product teams don’t exist to deliver features. We exist to deliver business value by solving customer problems. Any time we learn how to solve a valuable customer problem and we launch that, we have succeed.
Ignore your customers?
Shouldn’t we always listen to our customers if we want to create great products? Yes and no. Blindly following the maxim that good managers should keep close to their customers can sometimes be a fatal mistake. Clayton Christensen – The Innovator’s Dilemma Clayton Christensen goes on to outline the dilemma we face as product managers. …
Table stakes in product management?
I sometimes hear the phrase “table stakes” used to describe a feature. Basically a shorthand for a feature we can’t possibly leave out because the competitors have it, and the customer expects it. As a product manager, this assumption of “table stakes” is dangerous because it assumes knowledge of our customer’s needs and leads to …
Patterns
As we transition from a Waterfall to an Agile approach to planning and product management, there is fear that there will be no plan, no organization, and long term vision. In the book, A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander captures well though how we can use patterns, starting small and growing bigger to create a town …
Cannibalizing Your Product
What would it look like to cannibalize your own business, your own product? Clayton Christensen said it well when he wrote – “The fear of cannibalizing sales of existing products is often cited as a reason why established firms delay the introduction of new technologies.” If we fail to disrupt ourselves, then we will allow …
Books for a quiet Thanksgiving
Since I was a kid, I’ve loved to read, but as I’ve gotten older, I found myself more distracted and with less focused time to read. This Thanksgiving we find ourselves with more downtime than usual, and so I thought I’d share two books that have been valuable to me over the years, and that …