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 work. With the rise of […]
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. But there is no right answer. […]
The Dangers of Thinking of Products as Features
It’s easy to spend the majority of your time talking about features. You track features in your backlog. You schedule features on your roadmap. Your customers request features. Your sales team complaints about missing features. Almost everyone thinks of products as features. But if you want to build better products, you need to stop thinking […]
The Challenges of Releasing Early and Often
Have you ever rolled out a major product change while one of your sales reps was demo’ing your product to a prospect? I have. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t a small change. It was a new home page, completely new positioning, new branding. A whole new identity. It was a Tuesday morning, late in April […]
