» Keeping your users’ attention means minimising cognitive drain
» Customer onboarding is a continuous process
» Video games use contextual nudges to teach players how the game works
» A new customer success team builds trust by prioritising people, then process
» Use sensitivity analysis to identify the make-or-break metrics for your business
» Your analytics approach needs to change over time to keep up with your evolving product
» Blindly copying best practices results in an imperfect copy
» Analytics tools don’t do the thinking for you
Imagine you’ve just been told that you’ll be a member of the team responsible for the first manned mission to Mars.
Now imagine someone asks you how much the mission’s going to cost. The whole thing. There and back. By close of business on Thursday.
» A milkshake is really just a way to pass the time and stave off hunger on a long drive
» Users struggling to use your product to complete their tasks have unmet needs
» Christensen emphasises the higher order goal, Ulwick the task at hand
» Jobs To Be Done is often misunderstood, making it difficult for some to begin applying it
» Amazon warehouses are gradually moving towards full robotic automation
» Greater automation creates new types of work, but not necessarily for people
» Smart contracts are already automating financial transactions, but can be susceptible to coding flaws
» Increased use of machine learning in insurance places greater burden on regulators to ensure fairness
» Emotional intelligence is more important than technical skills
» Hire people who will increase your rate of learning
» A head of product needs prior experience as a product manager
» Good candidates have initiative and passion to pursue their opinions
I’m often involved in the interviewing and hiring interviewing process, so I’d like to share with you my product leader’s guide to interviewing product managers.
» “Requirements” is another way of saying “just shut up and build it”
» A user story is deliberately sparse on detail to provoke a team conversation about the user’s goal
» We often incorrectly assume everyone does something the same way
» The mental model to describe epics, user stories and tasks can be clarified with visual artefacts
» Don’t ignore technical debt
» Devote time for removing some debt in every sprint
» Debt can be a prudent choice in some situations
» It’s harder to read code than write it — so resist the temptation to start the code base again from scratch
“Should the product manager have some level or perhaps a great deal of responsibility for the profitability of the product? Should they understand things like the unit economics, that sort of thing?”