PRODUCTHEAD is my free curated newsletter of the best articles, videos and podcasts from product leaders and commentators all over the world. All neatly packaged up in a weekly email delivery for your reading, viewing and listening pleasure. Curated by Jock Busuttil (jockbusuttil.com).
» 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
» Match your product’s units to how your customer measures value
» Changing your pricing model regularly needn’t be a bad thing — it just has to be done carefully
» With usage-based pricing, help your customers to anticipate their likely costs
» Care has to be taken to keep dynamic / surge pricing transparent
» Moving to a product-led growth model takes time and will encounter resistance
» A product-led model does not replace the sales-led or marketing-led approach completely
» Growth loops operate on a similar principle to compound interest
» Software companies with a frictionless product approach displace custom-built apps
» Take a systematic approach to evaluating multiple solutions to the same opportunity
» ‘Assumption’ is just another word for ‘things we believe’
» When there are many opportunities in contention, assess whether it’s worth solving the problem
» We tend to come up with solutions before defining the problem they solve
