Archive of the PRODUCTHEAD newsletter, a regular newsletter of product management goodness, curated by Jock Busuttil (@jockbu).
» 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
» Scenario analysis frees you to consider how things would be different without limiting constraints
» Innovation can occur when challenging received wisdom on what is possible or not
» Scenario analysis can also help you to consider alternate strategies in a dynamic market
» In business, certainty tends to be rewarded, even if artificial
» Beliefs save cognitive effort and so are difficult to dislodge
» The scientific method allows us to constructively try to disprove beliefs
» We can retrain ourselves not to associate uncertainty with negative outcomes
» A red team mindset benefits information gathering, sense-making, decision-taking and planning
» Red teaming is similar to ethical hacking, in which a simulated attack uncovers flaws
» Consquence scanning is a technique for clarifying intended and unintended effects of your product
» Written well, personal user manuals can build psychological safety
» However, they can also be abused to excuse certain counter-productive behaviours
» Most read: Choose your own adventure — discussing better product roadmaps
» Most clicked: How to sharpen up your vision and strategy — a practical set of prompts and worked examples
