PRODUCTHEAD is a regular newsletter of product management goodness,
curated by Jock Busuttil.
fake plastic opportunity solution trees #
every PRODUCTHEAD edition is online for you to refer back to
tl;dr
To keep forward momentum, frame discovery around decision making, not just insight
Product people fight for the users, our teams and the business’s overall health
hello
Scott Colfer writes about the new trap facing product managers and their teams, that of falling in love with the problem. Speaking from his perspective on government and non-profit teams, he observes there can be a tendency for discovery to become “too expensive, too slow, too abstract”.
Perhaps a contributory factor is sunk cost fallacy: teams invest so much developing empathy and understanding for a group of users with a problem that they become reluctant to let it go. Yet let it go they must if attempting to solve it will just not be sufficiently desirable, financially viable, technically feasible, or aligned enough with the broader goals of senior management.
Discovery was always meant to be a way of ruling out as quickly as possible what we won’t do to allow us to focus on something more worthwhile.
Rich Mironov has written a very human manifesto, a rallying cry to remind us who and what product managers are meant to be fighting for. Ever practical with his advice, he also breaks down what ‘good’ looks like with examples. It feels right that he emphasises our users, our teams and our organisations, in that order. All are important, but some are more so than others.
Speak to you soon,
Jock
what to think about this week
Falling In Love With Problems Is The New Trap
There’s something quietly creeping into Discovery in government. It’s been emerging for a while and sounds like this:
“This took too long.”
“We already knew that.”
“So… what now?”
It’s already got a name: Discovery-itis.
Why discovery gets stuck, and how to get it moving again
[Scott Colfer / Product In Service]
What We Fight For
At a recent Product Weekend gathering of CPOs, we talked about product leadership values and what lifts our hearts. That turned into a conversation about what we fight for: broad principles and concrete actions that earn us our place as product leaders. Here was my take:
We fight for the users
We fight for our (extended) teams
We fight for the business’s overall health
I’ve written/spoken about this in terms of love and emotional energy: how we bring our hearts to such an unbounded, underappreciated, complex job. Here, I reframe that in more organizational terms.
Knowing what we fight for is as important as knowing what brings us joy
[Rich Mironov / Product Bytes]
recent posts
A quick overview of discovery
» Have a bias to test, learn, and to put code in production
» Feed what you learn from exploring solutions back into your understanding of the problem
» Help stakeholders visualise their ideas to make them easier to challenge, assess risk and test out
Bookmark this one for reference
[I Manage Products]
How product teams can measure discovery
» We can and should measure discovery activity and its impact on the team and users
» Discovery cycle time and cadence are critical to adopting a continuous mindset
» Avoid vanity quantity metrics such as number of research activities; measure quality instead
How to tell you’re doing discovery effectively
[I Manage Products]
Are developers vibe coding themselves out of a job?
And is the increasing reliance by junior developers on AI coding assistants storing up a generational skills shortage for the future – ‘professional debt’, if you will?
So simple, anyone could do it. Wait – don’t fire me
[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 recalcitrant IPv6 networks.