Archive of the PRODUCTHEAD newsletter, a regular newsletter of product management goodness, curated by Jock Busuttil (@jockbu).
» 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
» Conversational programming changes the nature of the developer job, but doesn’t do away with it
» Describing needs and context is more valuable than giving instructions or requirements
» There are 3 reasons why a discovery should end:
1. It is purely performative
2. Ignored / unknown context
3. Unconnected to value
» Everything on your product roadmap should have lots of context that is easy to find
» By reinstating Sam Altman, OpenAI has chosen financial success over its altruistic principles
» When Steve Jobs left Apple in 1985, the board believed he wasn’t ready to be CEO
» Google was quick to fire ethicist Timnit Gebru when she challenged its lucrative search advertising business
» Product models are more scalable and have higher investor valuations than service models, but can be more difficult to implement and require a longer sales cycle
» If you find your team is biasing towards delivering custom features (= output), refocus on discovery and problem solving instead (= outcomes)
» When designing an experiment to test a hypothesis, ask how might it fail, and what you need to find out
» Luck and uncertainty mean that even good decisions can have a bad outcome (and vice versa)
» Framing our beliefs with a confidence percentage makes us more willing to accept contradictory evidence
» Anyone can access generative AI, so simply using it is not a competitive advantage
» SEO has long sought to game search engine rankings; AI provides a new tool for doing so
» LLMs trained on AI output become increasingly detached from reality: “model collapse”
