AI has made building easier.

The Product Model

But building the right thing is still hard.

Ten articles every week on what is happening across product, research, design and engineering. Curated by Rory Madden to help teams decide what to build.

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The archive

Ideas for your next step.

306 published editions

The Product Model #234: 3 Types of Design Experiment (and when to use them)

When identifying the assumptions behind our solutions, we categorised them under the four key product risks: desirability, usability, feasibility, and viability.

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The Product Model #233: The Biggest Lie that Designers Believe about Software Development

Design is creative, it's messy, there are lot's of dead ends and backtracking as you iterate towards solutions that work. Development is a more logical, linear flow of turning the design into working software. It sounds great - but it's wrong.

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The Product Model #232: Prioritising Assumptions

A thorough assumption-mapping exercise might reveal 20, 30, or even more assumptions for a single feature. We don't have time to test all of them so we need to be strategic about which assumptions we validate first.

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The Product Model #231: Identifying the Assumptions that Underpin your Features

Every product or feature we build rests on a foundation of assumptions about how users will behave. If these assumptions are wrong it could sink our whole feature. That's why identifying the key assumptions is critical to enable us to test our designs before we over-invest in bui

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The Product Model #230: Stop trying to argue for the value of design

It’s so obvious. If we invest a little bit more time in design upfront then we will save so much time and money by building better products that customers actually love.

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The Product Model #229: How to Run an Effective Ideation Session

Have you ever left a brainstorming session feeling more frustrated than inspired? The reasons that ideation sessions often fall flat comes down to a few predictable challenges but luckily there are proven techniques to overcome these challenges and help your team generate creativ

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The Product Model #228: The 3 Pillars of Good Ideation

Have you ever gotten stuck in an ideation session when trying to come up with new ideas? The blank page can be quite daunting, but the common advice is to push through because quantity equals quality. But quantity on it's own is not enough.

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The Product Model #227: How to Create a Research Plan

The research space is virtually infinite. We could spend all of our research time and effort talking to the wrong people about the wrong topics.

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Cross-Functional #226: Stream Teams Don't Need to Communicate their Research

The biggest risk with research is that it sits on a shelf gathering dust. So naturally researchers are keen to communicate and evangelise their research insights.

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Cross-Functional #225: Comparing Different Opportunity Prioritisation Frameworks

RICE, Kano, Cost of Delay or your home grown ranking method. What is the best way to prioritise different opportunities?

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Cross-Functional #224: How To Tame Your Unruly Opportunity Solution Trees

Every article you read about Opportunity Solution Trees (OST) shows the same thing: a beautifully organised diagram with clear hierarchies, thoughtfully organised opportunities, and neatly arranged solutions. But if you've used OSTs in practice, you know the reality: they get mes

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Cross-Functional #223: Documenting Research Insights

Should you create a report, a user-journey map, an affinity map or an opportunity solution tree to document your research insights?

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Cross-Functional #222: Running Productive Research Interviews

I attended a workshop on interviewing by Bob Moesta a few years back. Instead of just talking theory, Bob did a live interview during the workshop and it was one of the most eye-opening experiences in terms of witnessing how effective someone who is really skilled in interviewing

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