It’s no secret that product management is often a misunderstood and misused role. Many companies restrict PMs to narrow, stereotypical jobs, hindering their potential impact. Without strong role models, some PMs fall victim to these product management myths and perpetuate them to new hires. Here are six wrong ways to think about the product managers, and an alternative that I like.  The CEO of the product This old chestnut is fading away, but I still come across PMs who believe it’s their job to tell the developers and designers what to do, and to control their time and quality of outputs ..read more

Observing tech companies you may notice a broad, disturbing phenomenon: everyone’s hard at work “selling” their product ideas — stakeholders and engineers are selling to product managers, product managers are selling to management, and management is selling to everyone (just listen attentively in the next all-hands meeting). As a product manager I too had to play this game. I remember one job interview, many years ago, when the hiring manager asked me to “sell him my shirt” as a test of my pitching skills. It seems that when it comes to promoting ideas, critical thinking, humility, and evidenc ..read more

When talking to product managers, company leaders, and customer-facing folk, a common belief surfaces: if enough customers (b2c), or an important customer (b2b) ask for something, then we should build it.  This axiom is reflected in prioritization discussions as well as in many product management tools that rank ideas by “customer votes”.  Customer feedback, whether it comes from feedback tools, interviews, surveys, sales calls, advisory boards, or any other means, is extremely important. We want to  stay attuned to what’s important to our customers, and to satisfy their needs ..read more

Recently the product sphere boiled-over over Airbnb’s controversial move to remove product managers from product teams and convert them to product marketing managers. The Airbnb transformation may be a one-of — essentially an attempt to adopt the top-down Apple hardware model, but the story and the discussion that followed surfaced an age-old debate: who should rule the product?  In a classic case of Miles’ law, where you stand seems to depend on where you sit:   Many managers simply assume it’s their job to decide what to build and when, partly because that’s how things were d ..read more

As I’m writing this, the dreaded yearly planning cycle is just around the corner and the debate over roadmaps is surfacing once more. On one hand it’s clear that classic roadmaps that show releases on a timeline create both high planning overhead and high waste. On the other hand, attempts to construct roadmaps around outcomes and themes (often with no timeline) may leave the organization wanting. Classic roadmaps come with a big promise: they allow you to plan resources, track progress, and coordinate launches. While they don’t really deliver, the desire to have these things isn’t likely to g ..read more

Idea prioritization exercises are often  hard and unsatisfying. The discussions run long and the decisions feel suboptimal. Using numeric methods like ICE or RICE adds more process, but not necessarily more clarity, as the numbers feel “made up”. I’ve written in the past about how to make better use of ICE, but I have to tell you that that’s just one piece in much a larger puzzle. Good idea prioritization requires a few key fundamentals that many companies lack.   Let’s look at these missing parts one at a time.  Strategic Context Prioritization goes broader and deeper than ..read more

As I teach evidence-guided product development I encounter two types of reactions. Most people realize that their company caught in a vicious cycle of plan-and-execute that heavily relies on opinions, consensus, and HiPPO. But when presented with the alternative — using research, experimentation, building product through discovery and delivery — various types of objections crop up (in my book Evidence-Guided  I dedicated half a chapter to addressing  those.) Today I want to discuss a particularly pernicious one: “We’re already doing it. “ I’m hearing “we’re already doing it ..read more

On Feb 1st 2018 I published my most viral article. Originally shared on Medium and LinkedIn, it got hundreds of thousands of reads, and was liked and shared in a volume I haven’t seen before or since. It’s still my most popular article,   What was all the fuss about? In this article I first shared the GIST model: Goals, Ideas, Steps and Tasks. GIST explains how to develop products according to the principles of customer-focus, adaptive planning, evidence-guided decisions, and team empowerment. It’s a framework I started envisioning at Google, and later used to help my clien ..read more

The latest wave of GenML tools is truly remarkable. I believe all creative work is going to be impacted, including product management. But in what way? One answer is already on offer. In recent months Twitter and LinkedIn have been flooded with “definitive” lists of ChatGPT prompts designed to produce product artifacts: Objectives and Key Results, user stories, market size assessments, strategic models, user interview scripts… You can find hundreds of example prompts for any conceivable model and framework. The results are often impressive. The bot is able to generate complete and convincing a ..read more

Many companies consider the Net Promoter Score their most important customer metric. In the first article in the series we saw how NPS, created 20 years ago, grew in popularity and turned  into the default tool to measure customer-sentiment and to collect customer feedback.  But many experts doubt that NPS is indeed the right tool for these purposes. Some question the logic and science behind it. Many feel that usage and purchase metrics may be more representative of customer sentiment.  In this article we’ll take a closer look at NPS and each of its parts.  By the end of t ..read more