Megan Quinn’s post on Development Cadence starts off really strong:

The hallmark of a well-run development engine is a development cadence that is brisk in bringing new products to market without burning out its builders.

And then it only gets better from there. Her point about being “flexible on scope, fixed on time” is spot on:

One way to establish a good development cadence is to commit to a predictable launch schedule and avoid slipping by pushing out features, not time. Some organizations commit to launching every month with the notion of ticks (small feature releases/fixes) and tocks (bigger, marketable moments).

Ulaize Hernandez Troyas makes a good argument for involving full teams in the prioritization of what to work on:

This type of ongoing communication throughout the prioritization process has a definite cost, but the number of benefits from this approach is worth it. We have reduced friction between teammates, which has saved us from long-winded conversations that stemmed from misunderstandings. The sense of ownership and purpose has increased the team’s motivation. On a more personal level, having these open product discussions has challenged my own thinking many times over, which has definitely improved our product direction as a result.

In terms of the specifics of how this works in practice, I tend to prefer a combined approach rather than asking the team to come up with an initial list of priorities themselves. We have a leads team that comes up with a proposal for our priorities for the quarter, based on our business goals and customer insights. We then spend about a week with the entire team discussing our proposal, refining the approach, and making sure everyone is aligned and excited about what we’re working on.

I really like Matthew Ström’s concept of Responsive Roadmaps that “visualize the process of turning uncertainty and complexity into outcomes and output.” He presents this as an antidote to all the things that are wrong with traditional roadmaps:

Traditional project roadmaps are right about our knowledge in a moment of time. They are good records of our beliefs about the correct sequence and magnitude of our work. But these roadmaps are wrong about the reality of work, and almost every roadmap I’ve ever used goes out the window as soon as the work starts. No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.

Responsive roadmaps are right about the nature of work: it is full of uncertainty and subject to change. They are wrong about what we’ll be doing in the future; the farther out we look, the less accurate a responsive roadmap is. That tradeoff affords us time to focus in the present on delivering at the highest level of quality.

He goes into much practical detail on how to create, maintain, and use responsive roadmaps.

On the Postmark blog I talk about how we use productboard to improve our product planning process. I’ve written before about about what I look for in product management software, and we’ve now been using productboard for a full 3 months at Postmark, so I wanted to write an update on how it’s going, and how we’re using it.

So far, productboard has improved my life significantly. I feel much more comfortable that I have a handle on everything we are working on, what we have to plan for, and what our customers need, than I did when we used non-specific tools for this kind of work. I know we all have a bit of “tool fatigue” going on, but this is something that truly adds value to our product and the way we work.

You can read the post here.

This is a good write-up of Alice Newton-Rex’s talk on Setting Goals for Product Success. She explains some of the key principles for effective goal-setting from a product perspective. One section I found particularly useful is her point that metrics and goals are very different depending on the phase a company is in. For example, for a brand new product, she advises not to create traditional “growth” metrics:

But, in my experience, these goals aren’t so useful for new products. It’s a lot harder to put numbers against your goals when you don’t have anything to dial up or down, and achieving some business outcome at all costs is less important than learning. I suggest adopting more hypothesis-style goals, in which success looks like proving or disproving that hypothesis. Don’t default to aiming to gain sign-ups, users or revenue for your new product. Aim instead at proving your riskiest hypothesis.

Casey Winters takes the product/market fit model further in his post Feature/Product Fit:

Every product team tries to make their core product better over time. But sadly, at most companies, the process for this is launching new features and hoping or assuming they are useful to your existing customers. Companies don’t have a great rubric for understanding if that feature is actually valuable for the existing product. This process should be similar to finding product/market fit, but there are some differences. I call this process feature/product fit, and I’ll explain how to find it.

This is a great way to approach ongoing, consistent improvements to our products. Casey’s practical checklists and advice are worth reading and bookmarking.

Andy Johns wrote a 4-part series on product growth that is worth digging into. In Part 1: A Single-Minded Perspective on Growth he points out the trap many product companies fall into:

The point I’m making is that today’s startups very quickly fall into the optimization trap where they think future growth will largely come from optimizing their existing product. The better approach is finding the right balance between optimization and innovation since both methods can produce future growth.

This is why I am still, after all these years, such a big fan of the Kano model. It forces teams to think about these two questions separately: (1) what can we do to make our existing product better (optimization), and (2) what can we add to or change about our product to create unexpected value for customers (innovation).

This is an older article, but it was brought up in a recent thread on the Elezea Community (join us!) and I hadn’t seen it before. In Applying Leverage as a Product Manager Brandon Chu explains how PMs can have the biggest impact in an organization:

Managerial leverage is the idea that some things a manager does creates more output than others, and for each possible thing, the amount of output created per unit of time is its leverage. That’s the basis of how you should decide whether to do activity A or activity B.

When internalized, these concepts impart on PMs a sense of what matters most in their role. They have lots of choices in what they can do everyday — all of which produce some positive output- but developing awareness of where they have leverage is critical to their long term impact.

The crux of it is this:

Product managers exert the most leverage through vision and strategy — the rest is optimization.

Brandon shares a very helpful framework about the different types of work product managers do, and the best way to balance that work.

I’m a big fan of the product forces aspect of the Jobs-to-be-Done framework to help teams think through the challenges they need to overcome to get customers to adopt their product. In Product adoption: how to get customers to embrace your product the Intercom team discusses the product forces, as well as some strategies for overcoming those forces. For example, on decreasing attachment to the status quo:

What can you do to draw your prospects’ attention to your benefits over their feelings of belonging? It may be as simple as promising a feature they’re desperately missing (like online privacy) or mentioning the support options you have in place (so they don’t have to ask a friend for help).