PRODUCTHEAD

PRODUCTHEAD is my free curated newsletter of the best articles, videos and podcasts from product leaders and commentators all over the world. All neatly packaged up in a weekly email delivery for your reading, viewing and listening pleasure.



Recent editions

PRODUCTHEAD: Empathy with engineering (or avoiding developer disengagement)

» Rather than focusing on engineering team productivity, examine the causes of their low / negative value work

» When asked for development estimates, ask why they need the information and what they’ll do with the answer

» Different development tasks need varying amounts of user story detail

» Treat your developers with the same thoughtfulness as your users

Read more › PRODUCTHEAD: Empathy with engineering (or avoiding developer disengagement)

PRODUCTHEAD: Empowered teams can’t simply do whatever they like

» Empowered teams can only succeed if the leadership team is on board

» Leaders can’t scale or have all the answers; empowered teams stand a better chance

» Leadership needs to be open and transparent when issuing a “must-do” edict to an empowered team

» Product leadership is continually striving for coherence of approach and clarity of purpose

Read more › PRODUCTHEAD: Empowered teams can’t simply do whatever they like

PRODUCTHEAD: Training wheels and learned helplessness

» Motivation comes from making progress in meaningful work

» A mission-focused team tackling poorly understood problems may appear unproductive to outsiders

» It is everyone’s responsibility to act upon negative behaviour / thinking, but without assigning blame

» Even in the most controversial negotiations, the other party is just like you and aims to walk away happy

Read more › PRODUCTHEAD: Training wheels and learned helplessness

PRODUCTHEAD: Is there a standard product development life cycle?

» Success at every life cycle stage hinges on the same challenge: being able to solve problems for your users

» Early on, focus on learning about your users and their context and the constraints that affect your problem

» Maturity is the most difficult stage for a product, so you have to make the absolute best out of what you have

Read more › PRODUCTHEAD: Is there a standard product development life cycle?

PRODUCTHEAD: Charting your career path

» Early in your career, focus on building one skill at a time

» Find out what a company’s really like by meeting a contact there informally before the interview

» Practice experts can enjoy a varied career, but may find it harder to work in some domains

» As a product leader, what are your identity, superpower, mission and impact?

Read more › PRODUCTHEAD: Charting your career path

PRODUCTHEAD: Who’s in charge? You or the process?

» An inflexible process means working with incomplete information and making the wrong decisions

» Treating work as closed-ended projects leads to context switching and discontinuity

» A way to increase value in Scrum is to involve the team members in the discovery and strategy work

» Respect is not deference; it demands that we challenge each other to be the best we can be

Read more › PRODUCTHEAD: Who’s in charge? You or the process?

PRODUCTHEAD: Wartime vs peacetime product leadership

» Wartime vs peacetime leaders employ different skill sets

» Airbnb’s changes to product management could be just what is needed in wartime or equally a retrograde step

» Working from home is a particularly polarising debate because it aligns with the leader-employee divide

» Discussions about productivity are often a proxy discussion for some other dysfunction

Read more › PRODUCTHEAD: Wartime vs peacetime product leadership

PRODUCTHEAD: How to align vision, strategy and action

» Every decision is a trade-off — deciding what not to do is just as important as deciding what to do

» A good product vision captures customer, user, value proposition and links to organisational objectives

» Interrogate your goals: “For this to happen, what must be true?”, then mark which are facts or assumptions

» Avoid jumping on the first idea — check what problem we think it solves, then ask, “How else could we do this?”

Read more › PRODUCTHEAD: How to align vision, strategy and action

PRODUCTHEAD: Exploiting inertia for fun and profit

» When strategic frames grow rigid, companies, like nations, tend to keep fighting the last war

» If organisations (incorrectly) view change as gradual they will have resistance to the change

» The innovator’s dilemma: cater to current needs or attempt to anticipate future demands?

» Many common financial tools distort the value, importance, and likelihood of success of investments in innovation

Read more › PRODUCTHEAD: Exploiting inertia for fun and profit

PRODUCTHEAD: Product-led growth

» Moving to a product-led growth model takes time and will encounter resistance

» A product-led model does not replace the sales-led or marketing-led approach completely

» Growth loops operate on a similar principle to compound interest

» Software companies with a frictionless product approach displace custom-built apps

Read more › PRODUCTHEAD: Product-led growth

PRODUCTHEAD: ‘Better’ decision making

» Decisions should be the result of rational and deliberate reasoning, but not all are perfectly rational

» Almost every decision has associated downsides or compromises

» Avoid trying to please people or to allow individuals to dominate the decision-making process

» It’s easy to conflate transparency on the decision-making process, with transparency on the actual decisions

Read more › PRODUCTHEAD: ‘Better’ decision making

PRODUCTHEAD: 3 ways to handle team conflicts

» When delivering difficult news at work, you are not there to seek sympathy

» Tie business impact to deprioritised work to highlight the problem to your CEO without sounding whiny

» An organisation’s emotional culture governs which emotions people express and suppress at work

» Many organisation equate “fixing” to basically “patching holes in the slowly sinking boat”

Read more › PRODUCTHEAD: 3 ways to handle team conflicts

PRODUCTHEAD: What can product managers learn about discovery from a superhero costume maker?

» Don’t specify rigid requirements to your delivery team, have a collaborative conversation instead

» Try out lots of different solutions to the same problem

» Don’t be pressured to rush through discovery and prototyping

» Share knowledge around your team

» Avoid misunderstandings through constant communication with stakeholders

Read more › PRODUCTHEAD: What can product managers learn about discovery from a superhero costume maker?

PRODUCTHEAD: Writing a product manager job description

» The wording of your product manager job description could be putting off good candidates

» Listing excessive requirements for the role will deter risk-averse candidates

» Think about why you’re hiring and the candidate attributes you need most

» Don’t copy-and-paste other job descriptions — they won’t describe what your organisation needs

Read more › PRODUCTHEAD: Writing a product manager job description

PRODUCTHEAD: Trust and transparency

» Humility and authenticity go a long way in building trust

» It is hard both to share data when expected, and to do so in a way that is trustworthy and acceptable to the public

» “Nobody ever read a simple sentence and thought ‘well, that was too easy to understand.’”

» With care it is possible to create valuable products with user data while maintaining trustworthiness

Read more › PRODUCTHEAD: Trust and transparency

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