Archive of the PRODUCTHEAD newsletter, a regular newsletter of product management goodness, curated by Jock Busuttil (@jockbu).
» Companies hire freelancers because they need to address a specific issue or are not ready to commit to a full-time hire
» Excel by being a problem-solver — pay close attention to potential clients’ challenges
» Don’t apologise to your client for your (hopefully reasonable) day rate
» A pursuit of job stability can easily translate into an unproductive ‘inertia’ instead
» Self-sealing arguments are no-win situations: every defence you make is co-opted the by other party as evidence you’re wrong
» The Spotify Model was only ever a snapshot in time at Spotify
» It existed in the context of a company whose leadership valued trust, self-organisation and change
» As Spotify grew, it failed to strike the right balance between autonomy and collaboration
» Alignment to product strategy remains crucial for autonomous teams to deliver valuable work
» Rather than existing in a bubble, each product team should have core members, collaborators and supporters
» How you should divide up teams depends on your product’s overall flow; avoid ambiguous ownership
» Teams should have end-to-end responsibility for a part of the user journey with minimal dependencies
» One approach is to delineate between teams working on a core problem domain, and on those enabling their work
» Sonos is working through a major user backlash after launching a flawed app
» Pressure from senior management forced the launch to happen before it was ready
» Tips for recognising and managing tension as a product manager
» Round-up of lessons learned from failed product launches
» A common misconception is that openly sharing code presents security risks
» Keeping code open clarifies ownership and can avoid vendor lock-in
» Services are best identified as verbs rather than nouns
» You cannot have services without products, nor products without services
» A service is something that helps someone to do something
» Dissect your monolithic metrics to drive growth in more easily influenced segments
» Don’t kill the golden goose of growth by oversaturating a channel
» If growth is your goal, have a sense of urgency
» Sarah Jeong on why the Pixel 9’s Reimagine feature is the final nail in the coffin for trust in photos
» 9 Sept: I’m giving a talk for Product People on lessons about org culture
» Knowing what kinds of customer you want and don’t want help you to prioritise ‘one-off’ feature requests from sales
» “Enterprise customers look at our roadmaps as the starting point for negotiations”
» Are feature requests a deliberate strategy or a reactive wild goose chase?
