Archive of the PRODUCTHEAD newsletter, a regular newsletter of product management goodness, curated by Jock Busuttil (@jockbu).
» Common challenges leaders encounter are a lack of trust for their teams and executives, a lack of coaching, and letting go of control
» How others perceive the value and effectiveness of the product team’s work holds immense transformative power
» Have a bias to test, learn, and to put code in production
» Feed what you learn from exploring solutions back into your understanding of the problem
» Help stakeholders visualise their ideas to make them easier to challenge, assess risk and test out
» Customers care about your mission, less about how you’re achieving it
» For rapid feedback in discovery, ship and learn from more users, earlier
» Changing something that’s been that way for years is hard because of the inertia behind it
» Product people are tired of being held up to unrealistic standards
» It important to remember what’s in your control and what isn’t
» Now is the time to be extra rigorous with finding product-market fit
Product-led growth:
» is a strategy where the product itself sells itself through features and usability
» can create self-perpetuating growth loops
» can be even more effective when combined with growth product management company-wide
» Brand provides emotional context, which creates a contact between you and your customers
» Brands evoke a subtle mix of people’s hopes, dreams and aspirations
» Apple’s famous “1984” Super Bowl ad began a branding campaign that portrayed it as a symbol of counterculture
» Larger companies are far more likely to hire for intern, junior or associate level PM positions, but competition will be greater
» Product success comes from the way its product manager makes decisions, thinks, communicates and relates
» “First comes the crowd, then comes the funding.” — Brad Guigar
» Done well, a crowdfunding campaign helps with market validation and publicity, as well as raising cash
» Make sure you repay your campaign backers’ loyalty, faith, and patience
» Navigating change is hard because we don’t want to be seen as villains
» Don’t simply cut-and-paste another company’s organisational model without understanding the context
» Consider how the members of your team will understand the change, embrace it, and work through it
» A precursor to alignment is a clear product strategy
» Alignment needs you to tell the same story over and over
» Creating an assumption map can help to verify whether the team is actually aligned
