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
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
Read edition ↗In our recent poll, strategy came out on top as the key area that people wanted to learn more about. It’s a big topic so I’ll be breaking it down into a series of posts over the coming weeks. This week we’re looking at product visions.
Read edition ↗Open AI just released a new model (o1, previously codenamed strawberry) with chain-of-thought reasoning. In practice this means that it plans out how it will respond before responding. The resulting slowdown in response is offset by a significant improvement in maths, programming
Read edition ↗I just had an aha moment using Claude this week. I asked it to help putting together a dynamic convince your boss template for the conference, and instead of just giving me a text response it actually created a fully working React component and ran it so I could test it. But depl
Read edition ↗How do you uncover the true motivations behind how people use your products? Research! We can use the same approach to uncover the real values and behaviours that our company’s prioritise (and not just what they say).
Read edition ↗You know them, those glossy posters on your office walls, proudly displaying your company's values. They look great, but let's be honest - how often do they actually influence decision-making?
Read edition ↗In last week’s poll most people voted for diving deeper into how Values and Principles can be defined and used to help improve decentralised product decisions. But before we jump straight into values we need to talk about company culture.
Read edition ↗Have you ever worried when delegating a task that the person will mess it up? That is the same fear that a lot of management teams have when empowering product teams to decide what features to build. Luckily we can break good decision making down to a formula:
Read edition ↗Long-lived, empowered teams are expensive. Instead of having a business case that has clear costs and benefits, long-lived teams require companies to place a lot of trust in these teams.
Read edition ↗The first step is to prioritise the value stream to identify which ones need more or less funding. There are three dimensions you can use to prioritise:
Read edition ↗Last week we talked about the challenge of consistency versus autonomy when creating teams. This week I want to delve deeper into the topic of identifying team boundaries.
Read edition ↗