AI has made building easier.
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.
Explore the editions ↓The archive
‘Teresa Torres' book, Continuous Discovery Habits, is an absolute masterpiece. One of the chapters in the book introduces the interview snapshot; a one-pager template for capturing the most important insights from an interview.
Read edition ↗A small copy-and-paste error caused the articles to go missing in the #220 newsletter, hence we are sending an extra edition for this week with just the articles.
Read edition ↗Is it better to ask if someone likes a coat or how they feel when they wear it? Is it better to ask why someone bought a coat or why didn't they buy a sweater?
Read edition ↗People are really bad at predicting how they will behave in a given situation. The truth is every single decision we make in life is driven by emotion and logic takes a backseat (this might sound crazy but it is true, there's research to back it up).
Read edition ↗Not all research methods are equally suited for continuous research, where the focus is on trying to get high-quality signals as quickly and cheaply as possible.
Read edition ↗Last week, we explored how to help more teams adopt research by making it quick, accessible, and lightweight. But not all research can, or should, fit into a two-hour-per-week window. While traditional organisational structures often centralise all research, from specific product
Read edition ↗Last week, we talked about how we need to stop selling the value of research; we’ve tried it for decades and it is not working. Instead, we need to make research fit into the current ways of working. And that means making research quick and cheap!
Read edition ↗Who likes being sold to? The best sales people uncover people’s pain points and constraints and pitch their products to solve problems within those constraints.
Read edition ↗Achieving autonomy is essential if you want to hold teams accountable for outcomes rather than just outputs. However, meaningful autonomy requires clear scope separation and independent codebases for each team. But is this truly feasible?
Read edition ↗As companies scale, it often feels inevitable that the pace of delivery will slow down. However, this doesn’t have to be the case. The problem is that as we attempt to accelerate delivery through parallel releases, the number of dependencies between projects doesn't just increase
Read edition ↗Empowered teams get to decide what to build based on first-hand customer knowledge around pain points and unmet needs. Annual planning is the opposite, right? It is big upfront planning which often puts business goals above customer needs!
Read edition ↗In this week’s newsletter, I shared an article from Jeff Gothelf that says product strategy should tie back to real revenue numbers. I agree, at the strategy level. But we also need KPIs that go a level deeper. Teresa Torres defines three levels of KPIs: business outcomes (revenu
Read edition ↗A good strategy shares the context of why behind the decisions that have been made. People will invent a rationale if you don’t explain it. Sometimes they’ll be right, but other times they won’t. This will lead to ineffective decision making at a product level that can leave lead
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