Most people and teams conflate prioritizing and sequencing of work. Prioritization is the process of deciding what is important to do, and sequencing is deciding what order to do it in. Shaping a product strategy involves both. First you decide which problems are important to solve. Then you decide which problems are important to solve first. Your product won’t spring into existence fully formed and ready to compete like Athena emerging fully armored from the head of Zeus. Going to Market You will develop a go-to-market (GTM) approach which includes multiple releases of your product. Each rel ..read more

I’m excited to be joining my friend Jon Harmer, Lead Product Manager at Google, in teaching Product Mangers how to drive business impact. In our cohort-based class on Dec 2-3, 2023, with live instruction and hands-on work, we will teach the critical practices to being effective at meeting customer needs in a way which drive business outcomes. In the class, we will teach you how to use journey maps as product managers to form actionable insights on customer needs; how to use impact maps to drive business outcomes through what you build; and how to discover the greatest sources of jeopardy in y ..read more

Product strategy manifests as a collection of bets, investment decisions to do something or not, to do things now or later. A business case requires you to compare the predicted costs with the expected benefits. Your problem statement must articulate the expected benefit in economic terms to support your decision to place the bet. This article is the second in a three-part deeper-dive on the importance of using economic measures when writing the problem statements which are the key unit of shaping and operationalizing a product strategy. Undermining Your Ability to Prioritize Your Portfolio ..read more

Your process can prevent collaboration. The language you use in your problem statements can stop collaboration too. When you use proxy variables instead of economic measures of outcome you prevent your teams from collaborating and you reduce the likelihood of achieving product success. This article is the second in a three-part deeper-dive on the importance of using economic measures when writing the problem statements which are the key unit of shaping and operationalizing a product strategy. Undermining Your Ability to Prioritize Your Portfolio Stunting Collaboration which Undermines Your E ..read more

When deciding what to measure, we often choose metrics which sound good or metrics which are easy. These mistakes can make a product strategy incoherent, excessively expensive, and ineffective. How we talk about what we choose to do sets our teams up for success. Or failure. Unpacking Three Ideas There are two broad categories of measures – economic measures and proxies for economic measures. We operate with proxy variables all the time, sometimes for good reason and sometimes with hidden consequences. Leading indicators are proxy variables which provide rapid feedback when economic measures ..read more

Estimating with ranges requires a level of transparency which may be uncomfortable because you are acknowledging what you don’t know. Doing this, however, cascades into multiple positive consequences. This is also a necessary component of outcome orientation. Using Problem Statements to Make Choices I talk about using problem statements to “shape” a product strategy. It occurred to me that if you aren’t already doing this, then my assertion may not make any sense. I want to take a step back and explain. Using problem statements is an operational approach to shaping and expressing a product st ..read more

Product management is fundamentally a discipline of decision-making. Which investments to make, which problems to solve, which customers to serve, etc. The approach we take to decisions is fraught with peril, and we benefit from removing unconscious biases – improving our ability to elegantly make decisions to improve and advance our products. Thinking in Absolutes n the previous article about developing economic framing through the impact section of a problem statement, I introduced the following example problem statement. The Problem of… We cannot market to the 20% of repeat customers aband ..read more

Quantifying the impact of your problems puts them in perspective. It also exposes the assumptions you’re making, creating a virtuous cycle helping you to improve your framing of the problems, and making it possible to prioritize among them. When you first start to describe a problem, you may skip the notion of quantifying entirely, and instead describe an abstract scenario like “repeat customers abandon the new product registration process.” This is the not nearly enough, and most teams will catch it quickly – incorporating the magnitude of the situation, either in absolute or relative terms ..read more

Good product management is understanding the problems your customers want to solve, how your customers get value from solving those problems, and figuring out how best to help them. We need a little help to actually understand those problems from the customer’s point of view. Even good product managers will start with the wrong thinking, and organizations are commonly solving the wrong problems because of this. Anchoring Good product management is choosing the right way to solve a problem; great product management is choosing the right way to frame the opportunity. Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg h ..read more

There is more to identifying who’s problem you’re trying to solve – you need to also have a sense for the context in which they experience the problem. Problem statements solve for someone, and good problem statements also solve for somewhen. The Situation The situation your customer finds themselves in changes your customer’s goals and their definition of success at achieving those goals. Consider Amazon’s first mobile app, developed ~15 years ago. Amazon at the time made it possible for shoppers to shop for and buy most anything. Part of shopping is evaluating things they might buy – readi ..read more