As Product School says in their survey article trying to define what Product Ops is: “Product Ops operates differently at every company.” Which might be true, but isn’t very helpful. From my own interactions with companies implementing or exploring Product...
So many people I meet naively believe that the key to empowering product teams is simply to get the management to back off, stop micromanaging, and give their product teams some space to do their jobs. But as I’ve tried...
In the previous article discussing product vision versus mission, I received quite a few follow-up questions. Most of these have been addressed in earlier articles and in INSPIRED, but I thought it would be useful to gather together an FAQ...
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry The product vision is...
I promise this will not be one of those navel-gazing exercises. This is going to be a very pragmatic article about a critical and fundamental topic. One of the consequences of the popularity of the earlier article on empowered product...
Note: This is the narrative article version of a talk I’ve started giving recently at conferences, product meetups and corporate leadership teams. It is a long read, but I believe it’s a critically important topic, and it lays out for...
UPDATE: There is a new article that expands on this important topic: Two in a Box PM Five years ago I wrote an article arguing that it is essential that the product manager is also the product owner. My motivation, which I...
Much of product discovery work doesn’t actually require a lot of planning. We need to come up with a solution to a particular problem, and often this is straight forward, and we can proceed quickly to delivery work. But for certain...
When I first decided to start The Silicon Valley Product Group, I had just left eBay and had some very strong opinions about what makes great product teams, and great product cultures...
Overview In recent articles on keys to product success and the alternative to roadmaps I have highlighted that if you want the benefits of product team empowerment and autonomy, then you need to provide each team with the necessary context in which to make...
Exactly a year ago I was invited to give a keynote at the Craft Conference in Budapest and I discussed the 10 biggest reasons why product teams fail. You can read the narrative article here. As I mainly shined a light on why so...
In earlier articles I’ve discussed various aspects of Minimum Viable Product (which I like to refer to as MVP Tests to avoid any confusion with an actual product). In this article I’d like to say more about the critical concept of...
Note: This article is a collaboration between myself and my long-time friend and colleague Jeff Patton. We often work together to help product teams. We have both long argued that the best way to evaluate product teams is by their...
