PRODUCTHEAD: Escaping ‘analysis paralysis’

a product at the door #

every PRODUCTHEAD edition is online for you to refer back to

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tl;dr

AI may help you ship faster, but validating what you shipped still takes time

In large complex organisations, transparent, written communication helps to avoid misinterpretation

A strategy is just a wishlist if you never actually follow through on a decision

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hello

This week Leah Tharin explores the true impact of AI on productivity in product development, arguing that while AI does offer impressive gains, they’re often not as great as the headlines may suggest, particularly for complex coding tasks. In particular, Leah highlights that the product approach of ‘throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks’ only gets you so far before you have to change strategy. AI may let you chuck more spaghetti against the wall more frequently, but it doesn’t help you validate which product ideas are actually worthwhile.

As part of his CPO Stories interview series, Jason Knight interviews Hannah Kershaw, Chief Product Officer at Domestic & General (D&G), a company that lets people subscribe to a repair service for their household appliances. For product people working in traditional companies that seem to be about as far as away as is possible from a product mindset, this is a worth a listen. Hannah describes how D&G has evolved how they provide services to their 6.5 million subscribers, manage their extensive network of repair partners and retail distributors, and push back on the ‘we’ve tried that before and it didn’t work’ mentality.

And to finish off this week, Martin Eriksson is trying to move us from analysis and planning to actual execution. ‘Analysis paralysis’ often gets in our way, particularly when the trade-offs of a decision are unclear, or when that decisions is seen as both high stakes and irreversible – often when it’s not. He offers three tools to help product people move forward with their decisions: assumption mapping (to identify and prioritise high-importance, low-evidence assumptions); the riskiest assumption test (to quickly invalidate core assumptions, ideally with customer feedback); and scenario planning (to build resilience by considering multiple futures).

Speak to you soon,

Jock

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what to think about this week

AI’s “Just Ship it.” problem

“Let’s fire everyone who’s junior and midlevel. We have AI now!”, is AI really boosting everyone’s productivity to the wazoo, or is it shifting bottlenecks?

Everyone who actually does the work knows that while AI gains are impressive across the board, they are not as crazy as we might think.

“Talking to customers and building the ‘right’ thing for the correct market is still king”

[Leah Tharin / Leah’s ProducTea]

CPO Stories: Hannah Kershaw – Domestic and General

In this episode, I speak with Hannah Kershaw, Chief Product Officer at Domestic and General, a company that you might not have heard of but absolutely need in your corner the next time your dishwasher breaks. Hannah’s journey took her from marketing to e-commerce, into product leadership at GoCompare, and now to transforming Product at a billion-pound growth organisation.

[PODCAST] Establishing a product function at a century-old business

[Jason Knight / One Knight in Product]

Strategy into Action – Finding the Courage to Make Choices

Faced with three or four seemingly viable strategic options, teams freeze. They delay. They ask for more data. They schedule another workshop. They do everything except the one thing that matters: make a choice.

3 tools to escape ‘analysis paralysis’

[Martin Eriksson / The Decision Stack]

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PRODUCTHEAD is a newsletter for product people of all varieties, and is lovingly crafted from fixing things by turning them off and on again.