Archive of the PRODUCTHEAD newsletter, a regular newsletter of product management goodness, curated by Jock Busuttil (@jockbu).
» Motivation comes from making progress in meaningful work
» A mission-focused team tackling poorly understood problems may appear unproductive to outsiders
» It is everyone’s responsibility to act upon negative behaviour / thinking, but without assigning blame
» Even in the most controversial negotiations, the other party is just like you and aims to walk away happy
» Success at every life cycle stage hinges on the same challenge: being able to solve problems for your users
» Early on, focus on learning about your users and their context and the constraints that affect your problem
» Maturity is the most difficult stage for a product, so you have to make the absolute best out of what you have
» In product management, “the basics never change, it’s the more advanced stuff that changes”
» Oft-cited company frameworks such as the Spotify model were just a moment in time — everything moves on
» When all is changing around you, be an anchor of stability and trust for your team
» Early in your career, focus on building one skill at a time
» Find out what a company’s really like by meeting a contact there informally before the interview
» Practice experts can enjoy a varied career, but may find it harder to work in some domains
» As a product leader, what are your identity, superpower, mission and impact?
» An inflexible process means working with incomplete information and making the wrong decisions
» Treating work as closed-ended projects leads to context switching and discontinuity
» A way to increase value in Scrum is to involve the team members in the discovery and strategy work
» Respect is not deference; it demands that we challenge each other to be the best we can be
» Wartime vs peacetime leaders employ different skill sets
» Airbnb’s changes to product management could be just what is needed in wartime or equally a retrograde step
» Working from home is a particularly polarising debate because it aligns with the leader-employee divide
» Discussions about productivity are often a proxy discussion for some other dysfunction
» To buy your product, the value users perceive from the product must be greater than its price
» The biggest, worst-kept secret of monetisation UX: ask, ask and ask again
» Every decision is a trade-off — deciding what not to do is just as important as deciding what to do
» A good product vision captures customer, user, value proposition and links to organisational objectives
» Interrogate your goals: “For this to happen, what must be true?”, then mark which are facts or assumptions
» Avoid jumping on the first idea — check what problem we think it solves, then ask, “How else could we do this?”
» User and market research is more easily accessible, yet the opinions of senior managers still bias product decisions
» Confidence in an idea only truly comes from gathering evidence
» When strategic frames grow rigid, companies, like nations, tend to keep fighting the last war
» If organisations (incorrectly) view change as gradual they will have resistance to the change
» The innovator’s dilemma: cater to current needs or attempt to anticipate future demands?
» Many common financial tools distort the value, importance, and likelihood of success of investments in innovation
