A podcast about the best in product thinking. From product management and UX design to psychology and philosophy. How can we bring it all together to make life, our products, and our user experiences better.
Saying “no” is a big part of parenting and a big part of product management. We can’t do everything, whether that is buying every stuffed animal or building every feature request. But we can do more than simply say “no”.
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Weekly newsletter: Saying "No" Effectively: 5 Ways to Say No As a Product Manager
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Airbnb is done with product management? Maybe, but not so fast. In this episode we explore what they did and why it very much depends on what a company wants.
Product management is always different at different companies, and often fills the void of whatever is needed. Sometimes that leans more toward discovery and user experience. Sometimes it leans toward more technical. And sometimes it leans more toward business outcomes and general management. None of these are wrong, and the role always encompasses parts of all of it.
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Weekly newsletter: The End of Product Management at Airbnb
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Winner Takes All: Case Studies in how Online Marketplaces are Creating Modern Monopolies delves into the world of online marketplaces and how they are shaping the modern economy. It gives a brief history of digital marketplaces, starting with some of the earliest (like eBay and Craigslist) and then goes through the evolution of those marketplaces. In this episode, we explore some key takeaways from the book.
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Weekly newsletter: Winner Takes All: Book Review
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Messi, AI, and House of Suns. What more do you need? Another month, another host of great articles, listens, books and other finds from Product Thinking and around the internet. Here’s what you may have missed.
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Weekly newsletter: Messi, Estimating, Heatwaves, AI, and House of Suns: Monthly Wrap from June
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We, as humans, are bad at estimating. Everyone falls victim to the planning fallacy. We consistently underestimate the time it will take to complete something.
Why do we underestimate? And what can we do about it? Listen as we explore.
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Weekly newsletter: Why We're So Bad At Estimating: And What We Can Do About It
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This week we explore short-term and long-term thinking with an example from Covid-19.
We’d have been much better served during the pandemic if the FDA hadn’t relaxed its rules for so long or had thought about the long-term consequences of their hand sanitizer policy. And we’d be better off as product teams and organizations if we thought more about the long term while balancing our short-term needs.
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Weekly newsletter: Lessons in Thinking Long Term: Understanding Consequences of Short-Term Focus
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The holiday season is upon us once again (I know, I’m struggling to believe it too). But that means egg nog, sugar cookies, and giving gifts. You may find yourself looking for ideas for holiday gifts for those special people in your life. Or struggling with ideas for your own gift list. And if you or anyone you know happens to be a product manager or a designer, we’ve got you covered.
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Weekly newsletter: 10 Gift Ideas for Product Managers and Designers
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To create an excellent product or product feature, two things are critical:
Without these elements, you will miss the mark most of the time.
Elon Musk has been putting on masterclass so far at Twitter (and on Twitter) in everything not to do at a company. Let’s set that aside for a moment though, and zoom in on one specific area of the recent fiasco: the blue checkmark.
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Weekly newsletter: Elon, Twitter, and Blue Checks: Product Feature Critique
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Creativity is a critical part of our jobs and our lives. Yet it is often misunderstood. In his new book, The Laws of Creativity, founder Joey Cofone identifies 39 laws of creativity and discusses how each law applies to different scenarios in our lives and how we can harness these laws and ideas to recognize creativity and become more creative. Let's dive into it for this month's book review.
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Weekly newsletter: The Laws of Creativity: Book Review
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Another month, another host of great articles, listens, books and other finds from Product Thinking and around the internet. Here’s what you may have missed.
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Weekly newsletter: Underpants Gnomes, Chess Cheating, and The Laws of Creativity: Monthly Wrap from October
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I initially balked at the idea that sales and product/engineering should be treated the same. Then I realized that it is exactly what we are always asking for. We want the focus to be on the impact, not on the features. Listen in for more discussion about product management and commitments.
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Weekly newsletter: Sales Commitments vs. Product Commitments: Maybe We're Not So Different After All
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The more thought we put in ahead of time, the more thoughtful and prepared we can be. I’ve long been of the opinion that no one is great at “thinking on their feet” as we like to say. Rather, some people have simply put more thought in ahead of time and can draw on that preparation more than others.
So put in the preparation now.
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Weekly newsletter: Mastering Future Questions: Practicing So You Can Be Prepared
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If you are like me, so much of the work you do, and the work your team does, is invisible to most outside observers. You may understand what you’re working on, and your team likely understands it as well. But as soon as you move outside of the inner circle, the work becomes opaque. Move further away, it becomes a black box that outsiders peer into, but can’t discern what is happening.
This is often the source of immense conflict and consternation. Which is why this month we review the book Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flowby Dominica DeGrandis.
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Weekly newsletter: Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow: Book Review
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Another month, another host of great articles, listens, books and other finds from Product Thinking and around the internet. Here’s what you may have missed.
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Weekly newsletter: Lumber Prices, Second Jobs, Floppy Disks and Pax Romana: September Monthly Wrap
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Bringing ideas from abstract concepts to reality is a critical part of product and design thinking. The better we understand how to do it, the better we can create the best experiences for our users.
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Weekly newsletter: Being Overconfident, Getting Stupider, and Banning NFTs: Monthly Wrap from July
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It is easy to complicate our work. Many of the tools we use these days make it incredibly easy to add more and more with less and less effort. Steve Jobs knew that keeping things simple was the key to a good user experience. We can add two keyboards to an iPad, but users don’t need two keyboards to type on. We need to keep our work simple too. And we explore that in this episode.
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Weekly newsletter: The Importance of Simplicity: Keeping It Simple Early
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This month we're reviewing Loved: How to Rethink Marketing for Tech Productsby Martina Lauchengco. It is the latest book from SVPG and focuses on product marketing. So how does it stack up?
Overall, I was disappointed by Loved. I had hoped for a solid book on product marketing with insights or tidbits I could use as a product manager or product leader. I didn’t feel like I got that. It felt more like a heavily corporatized book, focused on the boardroom or consultant.
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Weekly newsletter: Loved: How to Rethink Marketing for Tech Products - A Book Review
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Another month, another host of great articles, listens, books and other finds from Product Thinking and around the internet. Here’s what you may have missed.
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Weekly newsletter: Systems, Three-Body Problems, Resurrectionists and Yellowstone: August Monthly Wrap
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It’s interesting to think about how much our pets influence us vs. how much they are a reflection of our existing preferences. I suspect it is both, though how much is an open question. We certainly can’t escape how our decisions shape our environment, which in turn shapes our decisions.
It seems like a stretch to say that dog owners take more risks and conform to their pets’ stereotypical traits without adjusting for many of the other factors at play. Which is why it is so important to look at all of these types of articles and research studies with a critical eye. And ask questions and examine sources. Which also goes for our own research for our products and our companies. It’s easy to confirm our own biases and assumptions, but we have to dig deeper and question our hypotheses rather than confirm our stereotypes.
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Weekly newsletter: Dogs and Data and Assumptions: Bonus Week and Off Topic
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The system we work in is critical for our success. We can make improvements within the system, and those are important incremental changes. A new rule or a new process can improve the system. But we need to assess the system holistically. Is it the right system? In our work and our lives, this means critically thinking about everything around us.
In this episode, we explore some classic examples of systems, as well as broken systems such as:
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Weekly newsletter: When the System is the Problem
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When we zoom out and consider the entire system, we’re able to see that the problem may not be optimizing the existing system, but rather changing it entirely. Because we get so caught up in the water we’re swimming in that we don’t see the problems all around us. And that is at the heart of product thinking.
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Weekly newsletter: The Forest for the Trees: Zooming out to see the real problems
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As people, we gather frequently. For meetings at work, for dinner as friends, for holidays as families. Yet so frequently, our gatherings disappoint us. But we still continue to do the same things, expecting different results (insanity, right?).
Book: The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker
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Weekly newsletter: The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker: Book Review
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Another month, another host of great articles, listens, books and other finds from Product Thinking and around the internet. Here’s what you may have missed.
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Weekly newsletter: Being Overconfident, Getting Stupider, and Banning NFTs: Monthly Wrap from July
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Being confident is good, being overconfident is better. Right or wrong, and especially when wrong, it’s critical that you maintain that level of overconfidence you’ve carefully developed. With the steps we’ve discussed here, you can continue to work on being more and more overconfident in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. And you’ll be better for it. The world will be better for it.
Remember, you’ve got the magic. The space magic.
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Weekly newsletter: Camping Trips and Creating Products: Building Better Products By Learning Each Time Through
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Camping trips are each a learning experience. So are each time we create a new feature or new product. We add to the tools we have in our packs and the experience we can draw on for using those tools in the field.
With each trip, it’s important to understand what’s working and what’s not, what we need for next time and what to leave behind, and how to get better. You can get lots of insight from everything you read and see, but nothing will replace getting out and doing.
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Weekly newsletter: Camping Trips and Creating Products: Building Better Products By Learning Each Time Through
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Tony Fadell led the incredibly successful teams that built the iPod, the iPhone, and the Nest Thermostat. He also led or was part of other teams that failed just as big. So his new book Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making is now one of my new favorites for building meaningful products. A great product management and UX book review to check out.
Book: Build by Tony Fadell
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Weekly newsletter: Build by Tony Fadell: Book Review
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We review the newsletters and episodes from this month, including product principles, extreme open-mindedness, and our book review on How Innovation Works. We also look at other articles on Free Will and podcasts from Product by Design (my other show) to interviews with CEOs and VCs. And a great thread on dragonflies.
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Weekly newsletter: Extreme Open-Mindedness, Free Will, and Reorgs: Monthly Wrap from June
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Moving fast is difficult. Moving fast as teams grow is even more difficult. With a million decisions to make each day, how can you ensure everyone is making the right ones? A good vision and strategy will get you part of the way there, but what about the tiny tradeoffs that happen day-to-day?
By establishing principles and tenets for your teams and products, you can ensure everyone is aligned around the right priorities and the right frameworks, without having to discuss every decision.
But what are principles? And how do we create them? And why should we? Let’s explore these ideas.
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Weekly newsletter: Creating Product Principles: Developing A Framework for Alignment and Decision Making
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Extreme open-mindedness is the mark of great thinkers, especially great product thinkers. We are never done taking inputs and creating something new. The world is ever changing, ever evolving, and we must evolve with it. Our products must evolve with it. Our thinking must evolve with it. We cannot close our minds to what is around us, to the new ideas that surround us, and the possibilities that await. So keep your mind open, and go create.
Links
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Weekly newsletter: Extreme Open-Mindedness
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This month we are reviewing the book How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom by Matt Ridley. Innovation is the reason why life continues to improve so incredibly fast and why we can expect and hope that our lives will continue to improve. It may not always be linear, but doing more, creating more, and making it more valuable is key to innovation. We need to ensure that we cultivate the right environments for innovation to thrive.
Book: How Innovation Works
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Weekly newsletter: How Innovation Works: Book Review
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There is an old axiom that you are not your customer. And it’s true, you are not your customer. But you should be. Or at least be indistinguishable from your customer and potential customers because you know them so well.
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Weekly newsletter: You Are Not Your Customer: But You Should Be
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The Startup Owner’s Manual by Steve Blank and Bob Dorf is an incredibly useful guide for anyone starting a business or building a new product. Creating all the research and documents suggested in the book will be a ton of work for founders and product people. But the effort will create the foundation for a solid company and solid products.
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Weekly newsletter: The Startup Owner's Manual: Book Review
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Understanding packaging holistically is a key step in the pricing process. And something that should be revisited regularly. Our world isn’t static. Your market isn’t static. And your product (hopefully) isn’t static. So you need to constantly be thinking about the overall product packaging and pricing to ensure you’re correctly “dividing the value you’re delivering” between you and your customer.
I recently had a conversation with Dan Balcauski for my other podcast, Product by Design. Dan is the founder of Product Tranquility, a product packaging and pricing consultancy. This podcast highlights one point of our conversation and expands on a few points. You can find the full podcast interview linked below.
Podcast Interview: Getting Product Packaging and Pricing Right
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Weekly newsletter: Understanding Product Packaging
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This month we’re reviewing the book Building A StoryBrand by Donald Miller. It’s a relatively short book about using stories, and the elements of good storytelling, to create messages that will help our customers understand our products and services so we can help solve their problems.
Book: Building A StoryBrand
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Weekly newsletter: Building a StoryBrand: Book Review
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Good processes can help us be more efficient and lead to good outcomes. But we shouldn’t be slaves to our processes. We should consistently evaluate them and ensure that they are leading us to the right outcomes.
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Weekly newsletter: Processes Shouldn't Be Ends
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The Scout Mindset was a splendid book about what it takes to see the world as it is rather than how we’d like it to be.
The scout mindset mirrors the product mindset in so many ways—being endlessly curious, constantly updating our outlook and views with the latest information, and avoiding bias.
None of us is perfect. We can all improve how we approach our work and our lives, and this book has many tips on how to do just that. And as we improve little by little, we can see more clearly, be more rational, and embrace the truth, wherever it leads.
Book: The Scout Mindset
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Weekly newsletter: The Scout Mindset: Book Review
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It is the height of laziness for managers to think that the teams they manage exist to make the job of the manager easier. Whether you manage a single team or an entire company of teams, it is not their job to make your job easy. It is their job to solve customer and business problems, and deliver solutions. Your job is to help them make that happen.
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Weekly newsletter: Optimizing for Teams Rather Than Management
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This month we take a look at Arriving Today by Christopher Mims. It is an excellent deep-dive into our supply chain. Getting items from factories to our door is massively complex, and understanding the process feels like it is only going to get more important.
Book: Arriving Today
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Weekly newsletter: Arriving Today: Book Review
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As managers, take home work can be a powerful tool to understand potential candidates. As candidates, take home assignments can give you more flexibility and an opportunity to go deeper into certain skills you have.
But for take home assignments to be effective interview tools, they need to be structured correctly. Assignments should add meaningfully to the discussion and process, not detract from it or become too onerous. But with a few key tips, we can all make the most of our time, our interviews, and our skills we’d like to showcase.
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Weekly newsletter: Take Home Interview Assignments
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It’s that time again — the end of the year. A time to look back on the good and the bad, and create lists. I enjoyed a variety of books this year, many of which came from lists like this one. So I try to pay it forward by giving you some of my favorite reads from the year.
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Weekly newsletter: My Top 10 Books of 2021
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Having a good product vision and strategy is critical to building and shipping good products, and staying viable as an organization. But it is incredibly difficult to do. That’s probably why most companies and product organizations don’t have one. And why many product teams and leaders fail when creating one. But we can overcome the hurdles to create the right direction for our products.
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Weekly newsletter: The Importance of Product Strategy
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The Alchemy of Us was a fascinating read, with marvellous stories about innovation and technology, and how we’ve both created new inventions and have been shaped by those inventions. As professionals and technologists, it is our responsibility to think through the implications of what we’re creating, and to fix many of the problems that have come before.
Book: Alchemy of Us
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Weekly newsletter: The Alchemy of Us: Book Review
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It’s Thanksgiving in the U.S. this week, which means many of us will be taking time off of work for several days to eat too much, spend time with family, or otherwise relax, myself included. Though it’s hard to believe we’re approaching the end of the year again already. So while you’re taking a break (or working, whatever the case may be), here are some interesting reads to keep you occupied. And we’ll be back next week with this month’s book review.
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Weekly newsletter: Some Thanksgiving Week Long Reads
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I personally won’t be losing any sleep over Zillow failing at house flipping. But there are several lessons we can learn from their failure. To create great businesses and great products, we have to focus, think long-term, and understand it’s as much art as science.
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Weekly newsletter: Learning from Zillow
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This month we are reviewing the book Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. In order to truly understand people, their problems, and ultimately our society, we have to use qualitative and quantitative data effectively. We have to cut through the noise and the lies we tell ourselves and each other, and get to the truth.
Book: Everybody Lies
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Weekly newsletter: Everybody Lies: Book Review
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Product discovery is critical for building excellent products. And doing good product discovery interviews is critical for good product discovery. To do that, you need to understand your goals, create a plan, talk to your customers, and share what you’ve learned in order to improve your future discussions and ultimately the solutions you offer.
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Weekly newsletter: Product Discovery Interviews
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Understanding our users and our customers is critical for the success of our businesses and products. The best way to do this is to actually talk to them. Not to pitch them or sell them, but to understand their problems and needs and how they are trying to solve these things. Once we develop this understanding and empathy, we can create the best products and experiences.
Book:The Mom Test
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Weekly newsletter: The Mom Test: Book Review
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This week I’m highlighting some interesting articles and podcasts that I’ve been reading and thinking about. A little different than our normal format, but lots of good content, including food shortages, labor shortages, wage shortages, Apple's monopoly and the paradox of choice.
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Weekly newsletter: Supply Chains, Shortages, Monopolies & More
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We have to ask questions, probe, and get to the core before we can create solutions. If we try to add water without addressing the real problem, we may create temporary fixes, but they won’t be long-term solutions. And we’ll end up spinning our wheels again and again. So rather than stopping with the superficial, get to the heart of the problems with your users and your customers. Understand why they have a problem, what they are trying to accomplish, and what outcomes they are trying to create. Then you can do something far more meaningful.
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Weekly newsletter: Understanding the Problem
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Ultralearning is a strategy for aggressive, self-directed learning. This book helps create a framework for learning new skills quickly and effectively. It is not only possible, but necessary for our rapidly changing world.
Book:Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career
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Weekly newsletter: Ultralearning: Book Review
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Having true ownership of products, features, metrics, and outcomes ensures that someone cares about those things, can focus the right attention on them, and can ultimately drive their success. If there isn’t ownership, there can’t be success. Watching teams, whether professional sports teams or product development teams, without ownership and accountability is always disheartening. They don’t win like they should be able to. But with real ownership, asking tough questions, and holding ourselves to a high standard, we can achieve amazing outcomes.
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Weekly newsletter: Ownership and Accountability
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This month we review Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs. We take a look at some of the insights and lessons from how Apple developed Safari and the keyboards for the iPhone and the iPad. And whether to add the book to your reading list.
Book: Creative Selection
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Weekly newsletter: Creative Selection: Book Review
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There isn’t a science behind sticking with a feature versus killing it. There isn’t a formula or definitive playbook for this. Which is why it is so difficult. Which is why product is so difficult. It is as much art as it is science. It comes down to the goal, the metrics, the timeline, and good judgement. In this episode, we look at Twitter's decision to kill Fleets and analyze the various factors.
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Weekly newsletter: Killing Features: The Art of Persisting Versus Ending Features
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Our products and experiences should focus on the user. It starts with understanding their problems and their needs. In my case, the fact that I was uncomfortable backing a trailer into a tight spot. From there, we focus on helping the user create the right outcome. Getting into the camping spot. Making simple shapes. So don’t make the mistake of getting the experience backwards. It’s not about the trailer, it’s about the driver.
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Weekly newsletter: User Empathy: Understanding Other Perspectives for a Better Experience
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Often the best ideas, products, or experiences aren’t the ones we’re actively looking for. They are the ones that come together when hard work and luck meet. Serendipity. What are some examples of serendipity in invention and product creation? How can we use serendipity?
Book: Range
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Weekly newsletter: Serendipity and Invention: Creating Products and Experiences Through Luck and Skill
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Innovation is messy. Because of that, there are many myths that have been built around innovation and innovators. In the book The Myths of Innovation, Scott Berkun does a great job of addressing many of those myths. It’s a great read for product people, since we are often at the forefront of innovation, creating the next generation of products and experiences for users, breaking ground on technology that hasn’t been tried. We know the myths better than most. And fall victim to many of the myths. So it’s great to look at the examples in this book and remember that the process is messy, and there is no single right way to innovate.
Book: The Myths of Innovation
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Weekly newsletter: The Myths of Innovation Book Review
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As product people (and as parents) we need to empathize with our users (and kids). It’s not about the feature, or taking one more turn, it’s about getting one more good outcome. Sometimes we have to shift our perspective to remember that.
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Weekly newsletter: User Empathy and Outcomes
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If you ever find yourself repeating the phrase “this is how it’s always been done” or “this is how we do it here”, that’s a good time to pause and ask yourself if you’ve got yourself a ritual cat. Good products don’t come from teams steeped in useless rituals. We use good frameworks and good processes, but we aren’t tied to them without a purpose. We use them for the outcomes they bring us to.
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Weekly newsletter: Ritual Cats
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What we need is to adopt a 5 Whys mindset to problems. Once we get past the initial problem, we can start to understand the root cause or the real need. And that’s when we can start to get to the heart of the problem and create real meaningful solutions for our teams, our businesses, and our users.
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Weekly newsletter: 5 Whys Mindset
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Planting trees is about the long term. But it's easy to get caught up in short-term thinking. Our businesses and organizations often prioritize the short-term at expense of the long-term. Which is why we never get the trees, but always get project after project. And in 5 years we look back and wonder why we don't have any shade or fruit.
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Weekly newsletter: Planting Trees
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In this episode, we review Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon. I know firsthand that we could all learn a thing or two from Amazon’s way of working and solving problems. It’s not perfect (and neither is Amazon). But the principles create a great foundation for any team or company to build on. And Amazon consistently out-innovates and outperforms most companies. So they’re clearly doing some things right.
Book: Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon
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Weekly newsletter: Book Review: Working Backwards - Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon
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We use the term “innovation” way too frequently. It’s become too diluted in our modern business world. But if we focus on the right definition, we can get back to bringing real innovations back to our teams and our companies. We can create products, processes and experiences that are truly new, better, and valuable.
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Weekly newsletter: What is Innovation?
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A product manager brings all of those things together. She talks to users before, during, and after the team develops a product. She makes sure there is a good business for what they built. And she works with the developers to build the thing and get it out to people to use.
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Weekly newsletter: What is Product Management
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User retention is the key to successful growth. Acquiring new users is expensive and fruitless if you can’t keep them. But turning your existing users into loyal, long-term customers is a powerful winning strategy.
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Weekly newsletter: Customer Retention
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Will Mobile Stay Mobile? The Future of Productivity in A Post-Covid World (panel discussion)
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This month we’ll review the latest book from the person many people refer to as the godfather of product management, Marty Cagan. The follow-up to Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love, Chris Jones and Marty Cagan have written just released Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products.
Next month we'll review Working Backwards: Insights, Stories and Secrets from Inside Amazon.
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Weekly newsletter: Book Review: Empowered
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Failure is part of everything we do. We stink at things when we start. But we seem to have the expectation that we will be good at everything, regardless of when we started. Even fundamental actions take practice. Which is why we need to get over our fear of failure. It’s not easy. But we need to give ourselves permission to suck at things.
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Weekly newsletter: What Have You Failed At Recently
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Burnout is a serious issue. It can lead to even more serious mental health issues of not addressed. As employees and leaders, we need to identify the signs of burnout and head it off before it becomes a bigger problem. We can encourage ourselves, our colleagues, our teams, and our employees to avoid burnout by taking some of the steps mentioned. It's about looking out for ourselves and each other.
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Weekly newsletter: 6 Ways to Avoid Burnout
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Most interviews are about understanding, and you will do well to edit your responses and distill what you know to its core to make it as easy to understand as possible for everyone involved. Understand the company and people you're talking to, understand your stories, and tie it all together succinctly. Here are the tips for how to do it.
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Weekly newsletter: 5 Tips For Product Interviews
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We're pushing the boundaries of our current technology. The pace of change will continue to accelerate. Some exciting innovations like NFTs offer promising solutions, but are in early stages. But we need to address underlying institutional inefficiencies as robots and AI make life cheaper and better. Check out the newsletter for lots of links for podcasts and articles.
Product Thinking Newsletter
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Analysis paralysis can kill some of our best ideas and our best work. But it doesn't have to be that way. We can avoid "death by data" by taking action. Even small actions. In this episode, we look at what causes analysis paralysis and what we can do to avoid it in our lives and in our teams and organizations.
Death by Data Newsletter
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Where we push the boundaries, magic happens. It forces innovation, drives understanding, furthers exploration. We don't need more companies simply maximizing quarterly revenue. We don't need more teams just incrementally adding product features. And we don't need more shortsighted MBAs. We need people pushing boundaries. We don't get to Mars by setting our sights on incremental revenue. We have to set our vision much higher than that. We have to focus on the long-term.
Newsletter: Taking the Long-Term View: Product Thinking and Mars Colonies
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We all want to be appreciated. Even if it is just so everyone recognizes our expertise or the effort we’ve put in. As leaders, it’s important we recognize that. As colleagues, we can make work suck a little less for each other by acknowledging that we’re all in it together and we’re making meaningful contributions.
https://www.productthinking.cc/p/creating-a-culture-of-recognition
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With the news of Jeff Bezos stepping down as CEO, we look at the lessons from Amazon and what he's created. You don't create a company like that without incredible vision, drive, and luck. So what are the key principles for product teams and product people? And what's next?
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