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Product Managers, Level Up Your Problem-Solving Skills

I’ve never met a product manager who doesn’t want to get better at what they do. The challenge is not in the desire, but in putting that desire into action. Product management isn’t a well-defined function. It’s changed rapidly over the past two decades. Most

Must Reads From My 2015 Reading List

I’ve read 74 books to date in 2015. What follows are my top recommendations from that list. Books with Strong Ties to Product Management The first four relate to product management - empowering autonomous teams, decision making, creativity, and the life of Steve Jobs. 1. Team of Teams: New Rules

Goals, Processes, & Habits: A Recipe for Success

It’s December which means it’s time to reflect on the year and look forward to the coming year. Last week, I wrote about my annual retrospective and how I choose priorities for the coming year. Today, I’ll explain how I translate those priorities into goals, design processes

How I Use December to Super-Charge My Coming Year

December is one of my favorite times of year. I do my best to reduce my client load so I can spend about 50% of my time looking back on the past year and looking forward to the next year. I assess how the year went asking, what went well,

The Next Product Talk Experiment

It’s Thanksgiving week here in the United States so I’m going to keep this short and sweet. I’m trying a new experiment. I hear often from product managers that they don’t know what coaching is. Coaching isn’t a common model in the product world. Most

Be Curious, Not Critical

“It’s horrible!” I was mortified. That was the feedback I received in a client meeting where we were reviewing one of my designs. The client continued, “We have a perfectly good home page, why don’t we just use that.” I was confused. We weren’t redesigning the home

How to Choose Your Next Experiments

“I think we should use folders.” “I think we should use tags.” “I know. Let’s test them both.” Does this sound familiar? I bet it does. By far the most common mistake teams make when they are new to Lean Startup methodologies is they fall into the trap of

Happy Birthday, Product Talk - Thank You!

I was sitting in my doctor’s office after a harrowing couple of weeks. I can remember it like it was yesterday. On the prior Sunday, I had passed out in the shower. I thought I had the flu. I could barely crawl from the bathroom to my bed. It

Stop Wishing and Start Doing

"I wish my leadership team would pick one strategy." "I wish my engineering team would contribute ideas to our project." "I wish our user experience team would ask for my input earlier." "I wish our sales team would stop saying yes to feature

You Don’t Want to Miss Out on This

It’s easy to have ideas. You could rattle off ten right now. I bet you hear dozens from across your organization every week. This isn’t the hard part of your job. The hard part is putting those ideas into context. It’s deciding which ideas to pursue. It’

What Your Product Team Says About Your Company Values

Are you committed to creating a great user experience? Do you believe in data-driven product development? Are you motivated to create products that your customers love? I’m guessing most of you answered yes to all three of those questions. Let me ask you a different set of questions.

The 4 Most Common Barriers to Outcome-Based Product Management (And How You Can Overcome Them)

If you read my last post on outcome-based product management and thought how do I get there, you aren’t alone. I received dozens of emails, tweets, and comments from product leaders just like you asking this very question. In an ideal world, every product manager would start at

The Path to Better Product Decisions

I spend most of my time helping product teams make better product decisions. I’m starting to notice some patterns. I see three critical areas where we often fall short. First, we don’t always start from a holistic or systems view of the problem we are trying to solve.

The Dos and Don'ts of Hypothesis Testing

I see many product managers struggling with how to design and run good product experiments. It’s hard to know what to test and for how long. Few of us are trained to think like scientists. The tools are hard to use. We often overgeneralize our conclusions. It’s great

Let's Talk Innovation: A Conversation with Tim Meaney and Teresa Torres

In April I visited Tim Meaney and the rest of the Kindling team. For long-time Product Talk readers, you already know that I’m a big fan of idea management software and of Kindling specifically. (See related posts below.) While I have met Tim several times on his recent

How To Write Product Requirements That Engage Everyone on the Team

Why do you write product requirements? We used to write long product requirement documents to communicate the solution we wanted our engineering teams to build. But over time we learned that outlining every detail of the solution upfront leads to overcommitting to solutions before we know whether or not they

Product Managers Don't Own the Problem (And Designers Don't Own the Solution)

Imagine a product team discussing new commenting functionality on their company blog. “We should let people comment anonymously.” “That will only attract trolls. We should require real names.” “We should require unique names, but allow pseudonyms.” You won’t find a shortage of debate on this topic across the Internet.

Take a Team Approach to Product Delivery

Jim, like many product mangers, spends most of his day with his engineering team. He clarifies requirements, triages bugs, and seeks out hidden dependencies. Sally, on the other hand, spends most of her time with customers. She's understanding their context, uncovering pain points, and identifying opportunities to delight.

Your Title Doesn't Matter

If you’ve been reading Product Talk for long, you’ve probably noticed that I sometimes blur the lines between product management and user experience design. I started out as an interaction designer back in 1999. Back then we were arguing about the differences between interaction design, user interface design,

Fix Delivery to Make Time for Discovery

“How do we know if we are building the right things?” “We are building feature after feature but to what end?” “How do we know what customers really want or need?" Have you heard these sentiments before? I am hearing them more and more. Underlying each quote is a

Why You Can (And Should) Experiment When Building Enterprise Products

Every time I speak about hypothesis testing, I get a series of questions about how to run experiments from people working on enterprise products. The assumption behind these questions is that hypothesis testing only works with consumer Internet products. And the assumption behind that belief is that the only way

Run Experiments Before You Write Code

The Lean Startup has a flaw. It’s a simple one. It advocates the feedback loop: Build -> Measure -> Learn. I agree wholeheartedly with this loop. The flaw is in where you should start. I prefer: Learn -> Build -> Measure It’s a subtle difference, but it’s

My Favorite Books Read in 2014

I’ve read 60 books (so far) this year. These were my favorites. If you like these reviews, I’ll be launching a blog after the new year about the books that I’m reading. I’ll share details in an upcoming newsletter. If you don’t get my newsletter,

Don't Rely On Confidence Alone

You find yourself in a conference room with your product team. The white board is covered with sketches. You have an idea that everyone is excited about. You mapped it out. You have a plan. Your engineering team is anxious to get started. This is what makes building products fun

How to Estimate the Expected Impact of a Product Change

Your design team is excited about a new signup process. They are convinced it will increase registrations. Your sales team keeps asking for the same feature over and over again. They think it’s responsible for lost sales since your biggest competitor features it prominently. Your product manager wants to