PRODUCTHEAD: Not binary but a sliding scale
PRODUCTHEAD is a regular newsletter of product management goodness,
curated by Jock Busuttil.
man of product #
every PRODUCTHEAD edition is online for you to refer back to
tl;dr
“Sometimes the answer is to literally make a list of features and ship them”
When your organisation doesn’t ‘get product’, it may be your approach to product management that needs to flex
hello
Loosely, both pieces I’m sharing with you this week are retrospective in nature: John Cutler is looking back after 10 years at his (in)famous article ‘12 Signs You’re Working in a Feature Factory’, which spurred him on to write more; Scott Colfer is revisiting his Product in Service manifesto based on how he’s refined and sharpened the ideas from his earlier book.
If there’s a theme running through both, it’s about keeping things in proportion, in balance. About not seeing everything as a false dichotomy when a blend of the two options is a more realistic view. It’s possible to care about both outcomes and outputs depending on the situation and context. There’s a healthy middle-ground between teams never leaving discovery because things aren’t 100% certain, and never bothering to do any user research because YOLO.
Speak to you soon,
Jock
what to think about this week
TBM 445: The Feature Factory: A 10-Year Retrospective
10 years ago I wrote a post on Medium about Feature Factories that literally changed my life.
Anyway, it went “viral,” hit Hacker News, and I eventually got a job I really liked because of it. And it kicked off a lot of my writing for the last ten years. I’ve written close to a 1000 posts since. It has been a fun ride. I don’t write stuff like that anymore, but I love returning to it to explore my thoughts.
We all just want to feel like we’re making a difference
[John Cutler / The Beautiful Mess]
You Need to Start Before Product
Your users don’t care about your ceremonies, they care whether you’ve made something better for them. They don’t care about your deployment pipeline, your product operating model, your team topology, or whether you’re following the right framework. They just want something to be easier. That might sound obvious but it’s easy to lose sight of.
Don’t start with ‘product’ but with the change you’re trying to make
[Scott Colfer / Product In Service]
recent posts
Chess is easier when you can see the board
A Wardley Map is to corporate strategy what a chessboard is to players: you can absolutely play the game in your head without seeing the board, but if you can it’s a lot easier to play, and you have a massive advantage over the people who can’t.
Know what moves you can make, and why to choose this move now
[I Manage Products]
How to form a go-to-market strategy
A go-to-market strategy isn’t something you tack on as an afterthought to an upcoming product launch. Instead it’s about understanding where value exchanges occur, and figuring out how to make them more frequent, consistent and predictable.
Go-to-market emerges from your discovery
[I Manage Products]
We’re all addicted to AI, but it’s going to be okay
We seem to stuck in a contradiction in which we worry about AI’s effect on our critical thinking, while finding it equally hard to resist using. Why is that?
[I Manage Products]
can we help you?
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Helping people build better products, more successfully, since 2012.
PRODUCTHEAD is a newsletter for product people of all varieties, and is lovingly crafted from a 3.5-inch floppy disk.
Read more from Jock
The Practitioner's Guide To Product Management
by Jock Busuttil
“I wish this book was published when I started out in product management. It gives a really wonderful overview of what product management is and involves on a day to day basis.”
— Keji Adedeji, product leader & coach
Jock Busuttil is a product management and leadership coach, product leader and author. He has spent over two decades working with technology companies to improve their product management practices, from startups to multinationals. In 2012 Jock founded Product People Limited, which provides product management consultancy, coaching and training. Its clients include BBC, University of Cambridge, Ometria, Prolific and the UK’s Ministry of Justice and Government Digital Service (GDS). Jock holds a master’s degree in Classics from the University of Cambridge. He is the author of the popular book The Practitioner’s Guide To Product Management, which was published in January 2015 by Grand Central Publishing in the US and Piatkus in the UK. He writes the blog I Manage Products and weekly product management newsletter PRODUCTHEAD. You can find him on Mastodon, X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn.