Archive of the PRODUCTHEAD newsletter, a regular newsletter of product management goodness, curated by Jock Busuttil (@jockbu).
» 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
AI is:
» accelerating the design of novel proteins, enabling a new wave of vaccines and drugs
» predicting extreme weather events, helping to protect residents
» listening to the rainforest and sends real-time alerts for chainsaws, trucks, cars and signs of incursion
» monitoring the world’s oceans for illegal fishing activity
» To reduce coordination cost, partition the work by time or space
» Behavioural design considers customers’ levels of mental energy, cognitive biases, and their existing patterns
» Successful organisations reinforce psychological safety in different ways
» Adding more people to a team makes communication a more significant overhead
» To reduce coordination cost, partition the work by time or space
» Behavioural design considers customers’ levels of mental energy, cognitive biases, and their existing patterns
» Successful organisations reinforce psychological safety in different ways
» Adding more people to a team makes communication a more significant overhead
» Decisions should be the result of rational and deliberate reasoning, but not all are perfectly rational
» Almost every decision has associated downsides or compromises
» Avoid trying to please people or to allow individuals to dominate the decision-making process
» It’s easy to conflate transparency on the decision-making process, with transparency on the actual decisions
» The best moment to teach a user to use a new feature is when it is valuable for them
» Uncompleted tasks stick in a person’s memory, completed tasks are more easily forgotten
» Provide a safe, controlled environment to help users experiment and learn a new skill
» Developers and managers often have conflicting views of what constitutes value in software
» Software engineers should ideally understand both what they are building and why
» Unforeseen edge cases can cause headaches at roll-out, but provide valuable lessons
» When delivering difficult news at work, you are not there to seek sympathy
» Tie business impact to deprioritised work to highlight the problem to your CEO without sounding whiny
» An organisation’s emotional culture governs which emotions people express and suppress at work
» Many organisation equate “fixing” to basically “patching holes in the slowly sinking boat”
» Desire paths spring up as users’ needs and goals change
» The effort paradox: the effort of forming a new path versus the desire to take the path of least resistance
» In digital products we use analytical tools to help us observe desire paths
» When a new desire path emerges, question your old assumptions — user behaviour is changing
