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

Cross-Functional #209: Compelling Product Visions

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.

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Cross-Functional #208: AI can reason now

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

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Cross-Functional #207: AI Agents are here

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

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Cross-Functional #206: Defining Values and Principles

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).

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Cross-Functional #204: Setting KPIs to drive your Culture

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?

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Cross-Functional #204: Defining your Company Culture

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.

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Cross-Functional #203: Decentralised Decision Making

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:

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Cross-Functional #202: Funding And Governing Empowered Teams

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.

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Cross-Functional #201: Creating Stream Teams around Value Streams

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:

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Cross-Functional #200 🎉: Identifying Boundaries between Teams

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.

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Cross-Functional #199: Scaling Cross-Functional Teams

I was speaking with Richard Dalton for the Getting to Zero podcast and he highlighted a challenge that he faced managing over 300 teams at Verizon.

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Cross-Functional #198: Structuring Empowered Teams

Dependencies slows down product development, reduce autonomy and remove accountability. When you have handovers, if the product or feature fails you can always say “I did my job”.

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Cross-Functional #197: What's in a city?

We love Dublin. It's an amazing city, rich in culture, history, and incredible people. Dublin has been the home of UXDX since 2016, and it holds countless fantastic memories for us.

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