PRODUCTHEAD: Minimalist product strategy
PRODUCTHEAD is a regular newsletter of product management goodness,
curated by Jock Busuttil.
i might be a product manager #
every PRODUCTHEAD edition is online for you to refer back to
tl;dr
Balancing opportunity with strategy in the midst of competing distractions is hard
You wouldn’t let genAI write your product strategy without checking it, right?
Product strategy discovery focuses on the problem space
hello
I started writing a long, rambling story as a lead-up to what I actually wanted to talk about this week. I deleted it. Instead: I’m proud of myself for keeping on top of several deadlines over the last week without significant fuss, despite my natural tendency to procrastinate. I hope that you have some achievements you’re proud of this week as well.
My week also presented me with opportunities to shoot the breeze with some new people, whose enthusiasm has been infectious and a well-needed boost. It’s a rare indulgence for me to recognise while it’s happening that things are broadly okay, and I just wanted to share it :-)
For you this week #
Christina Wodtke offers a minimalist approach to strategy by asking who, why, what, when, where, and how twice: once looking out from your organisation and once looking inwards.
Jason Knight makes the case for humanity in product management in the face of generative AI. If you were to use genAI to help you write your product strategy, either you’re skilled enough as a product manager to spot what is and isn’t useful output and reshape it accordingly, or you’re not skilled enough to tell the difference, and just hope it’s right. Which approach sounds right to you?
Lastly, Roman Pichler continues to explain the fundamentals of product management clearly and concisely. In a recent article, he talks about discovering the problem space before moving on to the solution space.
Speak to you soon,
Jock
what to think about this week
Tiny strategy: crafting a clear, flexible plan with six questions
Balancing opportunity with strategy is one of the trickiest challenges in any organization. Opportunities are constantly presenting themselves—new markets, emerging trends, and unexpected partnerships. It’s easy to get pulled in multiple directions or distracted by the allure of potential growth. But too many initiatives, without a guiding strategy, dilute your impact and confuse your team.
[Christina Wodtke / Elegant Hack]
Product management isn’t dead and it’s not AI that’s going to kill it
Product management is a deeply human craft. It requires empathy, vision, influence without authority, and nuanced decision-making. These are all things that AI, and specifically LLMs, are terrible at.
Use genAI to complement, not replace critial thinking
[Jason Knight / One Knight In Product]
Product strategy discovery
The product strategy is probably the most important artefact in product management. But how do you come up with an effective strategy in the first place? How can you minimise the risk of offering an unsuccessful product and instead maximise the chances of achieving success? In this article, I introduce product strategy discovery as a systematic, disciplined approach to help you develop a winning strategy for your product.
The strategy work itself is never done
[Roman Pichler / Pichler Consulting]
recent posts
Is coding in the open right for your organisation?
One of the design principles that underpinned the digital renaissance in UK government was — and still is — ‘Make things open: it makes things better’.
For this article, I’ve focused specifically on the ‘coding in the open’ part. I’ll cover how it benefits public sector organisations, and how — in the right circumstances — it can yield a strategic advantage to commercial organisations also.
Increased scrutiny keeps us all a bit more honest
[I Manage Products]
How do you ensure success as a freelance product manager on a short engagement?
In contrast with permanent employment, the game changes a great deal when you know you’re only going to be in role for a relatively short period of time. That means you should think about two specific things: how you can deliver value as quickly as possible, and how to ensure you do at least the one main thing they brought you in to do.
Anything else is an added bonus
[I Manage Products]
DevRel and Product Management with Jock Busuttil on the Voxgig podcast
Voxgig CEO Richard Rodger explore the similarities between DevRel (Developer Relations) and product management, and we cover topics including:
» Learning product management by soundbite and from stories that gloss over the messy context has given a generation of product managers a superficial understanding of their craft.
Other professions find ‘people stuff’ hard as well
[I Manage Products]
can we help you?
Product People is a product management services company. We can help you through consultancy, training and coaching. Just contact us if you need our help!
Helping people build better products, more successfully, since 2012.
PRODUCTHEAD is a newsletter for product people of all varieties, and is lovingly crafted from a successful offering to the deity of productivity.
Read more from Jock
The Practitioner's Guide To Product Management
by Jock Busuttil
“I wish this book was published when I started out in product management. It gives a really wonderful overview of what product management is and involves on a day to day basis.”
— Keji Adedeji, product leader & coach
Jock Busuttil is a product management and leadership coach, product leader and author. He has spent over two decades working with technology companies to improve their product management practices, from startups to multinationals. In 2012 Jock founded Product People Limited, which provides product management consultancy, coaching and training. Its clients include BBC, University of Cambridge, Ometria, Prolific and the UK’s Ministry of Justice and Government Digital Service (GDS). Jock holds a master’s degree in Classics from the University of Cambridge. He is the author of the popular book The Practitioner’s Guide To Product Management, which was published in January 2015 by Grand Central Publishing in the US and Piatkus in the UK. He writes the blog I Manage Products and weekly product management newsletter PRODUCTHEAD. You can find him on Mastodon, X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn.