What Product Assumptions Are You Making?
When a team sets out to develop a product, they generate a series of hypotheses. In my experience, good teams are explicit about these hypotheses and test them before they invest too much time into a...
View ArticleSharing Knowledge: From Customer to Product Manager
This is the first post in a two+ part series. I have content in mind beyond the first two parts, but want to gauge interest before deciding whether or not to continue. These first two parts are...
View ArticleWhy the BranchOut Decline Isn’t Surprising
Earlier this week, ERE wrote this article about the rapid decline of BranchOut over the past 30 days. Peaking at 13.9 million monthly active users at the end of April, they are now down to 6.5 million...
View ArticleWhy You Only See What You Want to See
You arrive at the office one morning, excited to tell your team about a new idea you had the night before. They look at you nonchalantly. One of them says, “that might work.” You were expecting more....
View ArticleKnow Who You Are Building For and Why
It’s easy to be fooled by the Facebooks and the Googles of the world. Everyone uses their products. They make it easy to rationalize why everyone will use your product. But when you draw this...
View ArticleFix Delivery to Make Time for Discovery
“How do we know if we are building the right things?” “We are building feature after feature but to what end?” “How do we know what customers really want or need?” Have you heard these sentiments...
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The Path to Better Product Decisions
I spend most of my time helping product teams make better product decisions. I’m starting to notice some patterns. I see three critical areas where we often fall short. First, we don’t always start...
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The 4 Most Common Barriers to Outcome-Based Product Management (And How You...
If you read my last post on outcome-based product management and thought how do I get there, you aren’t alone. I received dozens of emails, tweets, and comments from product leaders just like you...
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The Rise of Modern Product Discovery
I love that Marty Cagan and Jeff Patton have long been advocates of dual-track development. Their efforts have helped to shape the ongoing conversation about the evolution of product discovery. If you...
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An Introduction to Product Discovery
I continue to be surprised by how many product managers aren’t familiar with dual-track development. I don’t care if you know the buzzwords or if you can define the difference between product...
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Why This Opportunity Solution Tree is Changing the Way Product Teams Work
I’ve found a visual aid that is profoundly changing the way teams work. It’s working so well that I feel compelled to write a book about it. But that’s going to take time and I want you to have it...
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The Evolution of Modern Product Discovery
Product management is evolving quickly. The days of gathering requirements from business stakeholders and documenting them in long product requirements documents are vanishing. We no longer take months...
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The Ladder of Evidence: Get More Value From Your Customer Interviews and...
One of the best signs of an effective product team is a regular cadence of customer interviews and product experiments. But it’s not enough to simply check the box on these activities; we need to make...
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Managing Product Teams for Success
I’ve been thinking about the challenges of managing product teams by outcomes. Most leaders want their teams to have the autonomy to go after an outcome, but they struggle with trusting that their...
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3 Best Practices for Adopting Continuous Product Discovery
It’s easy to think you already do continuous product discovery. Most of the teams that I work with come into coaching thinking that they don’t need help. They’ve read the industry books, they attend...
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How Compare and Contrast Decisions Lead to Better Product Outcomes
This past week I was in London speaking at Mind the Product. As usual, the Mind the Product team hosted a phenomenal event. You can watch the video here: Full Transcript This transcript is the script...
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What a Good Continuous Discovery Team Looks Like [Case Study]
One of my favorite parts of Mind the Product London this past fall was meeting a product manager and a designer who I had coached in the prior year. We met for afternoon tea and to my surprise they...
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How Much Time Should You Spend in Product Discovery?
I get asked all the time, “How much time should we spend in discovery?” I have two problems with this question. First, it assumes you do discovery first and then delivery second, which is not true. You...
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6 Guiding Principles for Effective Product Discovery
I’m co-teaching a design course at Northwestern with my friend Jeff Merrell. We are teaching business leaders and change agents how to prototype their way to viable solutions. In this context,...
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Creating a Sustainable Continuous Discovery Practice at CarMax [Case Study]
Back in March, I shared a case study about one of the product teams I worked with at Snagajob (now Snag). I’m excited to share another one with you today. This case study is about a team at CarMax that...
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