For this month’s Product Talk post, I recorded a video where I consider the difference between product managers and product owners. You can watch the video or read an edited version of the transcript below. I want to talk about product managers and product owners. This is a topic that’s come up quite a bit […]
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 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 […]
Drop Feature-Based Product Roadmaps
When I work on a product, I think about it all day long. I obsess over it. I love exploring the long view. What will this product look like next year? Five years from now? Ten years from now? I love the challenge of identifying the very next step on that path. What should the […]
Practice Defining Your MVP
Suppose you are building eVite. Or Facebook Events. Or whatever your favorite event site is. And you need to define your MVP. How would you think about it? Some of you might already be jumping right in. You are thinking you’ll need: a basic event listing the ability to rsvp the ability to view who […]
How You Build Matters. Finding Your MVP.
The MVP. The minimum viable product. The most misunderstood concept in the world of Lean startups. And one of the most critical to get right. Why Time To Build Doesn’t Matter In this post about prioritizing, I argue that time to build shouldn’t be taken into consideration when deciding what to build next. You should […]
