I have a few product-related articles that I wanted to reflect on and write more about, but I just don’t think I’m going to get to it. They’re all really good though, so instead of just archiving those notes I wanted to share them so you can check it out.

1.

Here’s some solid advice from Jason Knight on what to do when your product is a mess and you have to fix all the things all at once:

In a situation like this, you’re going to have to get super-pragmatic. You’ve got lots of fires all burning at the same time and you need to put them out before you can start prioritising ‘properly’. Your goal is to get back on track as soon as possible, and you’re going to have to do a bit of shovelling to get there. Do what you need to get done.

And:

What we’re doing here is looking to put out the fires, and get a variety of initiatives to a base level of quality. You’re very unlikely to be able to make 15 things amazing all at once. Your goal here is to make all ships rise together. This means working with your stakeholders to understand what the minimum viable solution to these issues is, getting brutal with scope, and expending as little precious development time as possible.

2.

Andy Nortrup writes about what he learned about product management from Bonsai:

Similarly, with software products, patience is an important skill to make sure we don’t push the team faster than they can write good code, or make changes to the product faster than you can learn from users’ response to the changes. Patience can help us be less frantic and pay attention to the work in front of us in this season rather than the whole roadmap.

3.

Rich Mironov talks about the differences between products and features, and I especially appreciated this point about what users care about:

Customers don’t care about how hard we worked. Our product either does what the customer needs, or it doesn’t. And it should be priced based on customer value, not recovering our expenses. Users don’t care how much we spent, how big (or great) our team is, margin demands from Finance, remote versus on-site teams, development velocity, scrum vs. kanban vs. XP vs. lean.