You might want to read this - Product Thoughts #133
Tim Herbig
Product Management Coach & Consultant | I help Product Teams connect the Dots of Strategy, OKRs, and Discovery through better practices.
Today, I have three announcements I want to share with you:
??First, I’m beyond excited to announce that I’m going independent from July 1st on, to entirely focus on my business as a product coach, consultant, trainer, and speaker. I’m incredibly thankful for the last two years of leading Iridion (and will continue to work with the team also in my new role) but am pumped to double-down in my passion for helping companies and individuals to form outcome-oriented teams and build better products. In case you‘re interested in working with me, check out herbig.co/consulting, herbig.co/training or herbig.co/speaking and reach out to me.
??Second, the Product Thoughts Newsletter will take a break over the summer between July 8th and August 19th to help you (and me) to relax and recalibrate without adding more signals to your inbox.
??And third, I won‘t be idling around during that time. Besides building up my business from the pillars I mentioned above, I will also use July and August to produce my first Online Course: The Product Discovery Online Masterclass. This will involve completing the script and slides, recording all the materials incl. post-production and setting up the corresponding Student group and marketing material. I can‘t wait to release this one (presumably in early September). Even the launch scope will be extremely valuable for folks, and the curriculum will continuously be expanded (so make sure to sign up for getting that launch pricing).
I‘m thrilled to embark on this new chapter of my career and pursuing all the ideas I have in mind for contributing to the craft of collaboration and product development. I can‘t wait to take you with me on that journey.
Have a great week and take care,
Tim
What I've been reading
We can improve our strategic content by exploring form. This enables us to move to more appropriate styles of thinking when needed, what Keidel calls “geometries of thought.” He argues that strategy can be parsed into four general categories, each reflecting its own geometry.
Treat Your Career Like You Treat Your Products
We all treat our products with care, respect, and diligence. We agonize over decisions and strategic direction, we think deeply about product direction, we care about the experience our customers get and the impact we have on our businesses. It’s our job to make good decisions. This article is about why we seemingly treat our careers so differently and what we can do to change this.
Develop Strategies to Quickly Respond to Future Challenges with Critical Uncertainties
Scrum is a framework that thrives on complexity. This could be complexity related to software development, product development or something else in which there is more unknown than known. By working empirically, the unknown is discovered by building small increments in an iterative rhythm. Continuously validating assumptions about what to build and how to build it. This complexity should also be taken into account when defining the strategies — the sequence of steps — we follow to be successful. Although everyone agrees that it’s difficult (impossible?) to predict the future, strategies are commonly defined in a way that ignores this reality. Instead of offering multiple scenario’s as options, only one scenario is described in tremendous detail. When a different unexpected future unfolds, panic kicks in and the chaos starts…
The Documents Product Managers Spend the Most Time On
There were plenty of other types of documents too, including Go-to-Market plans, backlogs, problem statements, project planning, decision-making docs, customer interviews, postmortems, and meeting notes. Overall, I was surprised at the inconsistency of document types. There isn’t one consistent set of documents that everyone is making. Based on this analysis, being a PM is still a bit like the Wild West. A lot of us are making it up as we go along, and creating customized solutions to meet the needs of each of our teams.
How we set up our Team for Continuous Product Discovery
Even with very short cycles between discovery and delivery, it can take up to several months from identifying a user problem to the release of a potential solution to real users. While many companies adopt agile and product discovery techniques to better understand their customers faster, it still takes too much time and effort to identify suitable solutions that solve real user problems and also help the business.
But 15 years later, Amazon is worth more than $900 billion, compared to just $33 billion for its old foe eBay, which spun off its (more valuable) payment division, PayPal. And the Amazon Prime membership program is perhaps the biggest reason why. The service, which launched in February of 2005, was a first of its kind: For an upfront payment of $79, customers were rewarded with all-you-can-eat two-day delivery on their orders. At the time, Amazon charged customers $9.48 for two-day delivery, meaning if you placed just nine of these orders in a year, Prime would pay for itself.
Product Thoughts is a weekly newsletter/digest I send out to over a thousand leaders in product, UX, and business every week. To learn more about previous editions and sign up for it, go to herbig.co/newsletter.