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July 19 - July 30, 2023
Part I. The Build Trap
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The build trap is when organizations become stuck measuring their success by outputs rather than outcomes. It’s when they focus more on shipping and developing features rather than on the actual value those things produce.
Chapter 1. The Value Exchange System
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Companies end up in the build trap when they misunderstand value. Instead of associating value with the outcomes they want to create for their businesses and customers, they measure value by the number of things they produce.
Every feature you build and any initiative you take as a company should result in some outcome that is tied back to that business value.
When companies do not understand their customers’ or users’ problems well, they cannot possibly define value for them. Instead of doing the work to learn this information about customers, they create a proxy that is easy to measure. “Value” becomes the quantity of features that are delivered, and, as a result, the number of features shipped becomes the primary metric of success.
Chapter 2. Constraints on the Value Exchange System
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Customers and users are influenced by the people they hang out with—their communities, families, and friends. They’re also influenced by other technology—things available to them and on the market right now.
Chapter 3. Projects Versus Products Versus Services
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Products, as I said before, are vehicles of value. They deliver value repeatedly to customers and users, without requiring the company to build something new every time.
Companies that optimize their products to achieve value are called product-led organizations. These organizations are characterized by product-driven growth, scaling their organization through software products, and optimizing them until they reach the desired outcomes.
Chapter 4. The Product-Led Organization
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Product-led companies understand that the success of their products is the primary driver of growth and value for their company. They prioritize, organize, and strategize around product success. This is what gets them out of the build trap.
if you’re not product-led, what are you? Many companies are, instead, led by sales, visionaries, or technology. All of these ways of orga...
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Product-led companies optimize for their business outcomes, align their product strategy to these goals, and then prioritize the most effective projects that will help develop those products into sustainable drivers of growth.
Chapter 5. What We Know and What We Don’t
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Product management is the domain of recognizing and investigating the known unknowns and of reducing the universe around the unknown unknowns.
Part II. The Role of the Product Manager
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Chapter 6. Bad Product Manager Archetypes
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Product managers are responsible for the why? Why are we building this? How does it deliver value to our customers? How does it help meet the goals of the business? The latter questions are more difficult to answer than the former, and, too often, product managers who don’t understand their roles well resort to doing that type of work.
Answering why is very different than answering when. It requires a strategic mindset that understands the customer, business, market, and organization. This is a critical skill set for a great product manager.
Chapter 7. A Great Product Manager
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The real role of the product manager in the organization is to work with a team to create the right product that balances meeting business needs with solving user problems.
Product managers connect the dots. They take input from customer research, expert information, market research, business direction, experiment results, and data analysis.
Chapter 8. The Product Manager Career Path
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Tactical work for a product manager focuses on the shorter-term actions of building features and getting them out the door.
Strategic work is about positioning the product and the company to win in the market and achieve goals. It looks at the future state of the product and the company and what it will take to get there.
Operational work is about tying the strategy back to the tactical work.
“Board members care about the financial impacts of the technology and product decisions. A successful CPO needs to be able to translate their actions into terms the board will understand.”
Assuming they are already skilled in all aspects of product, technology, and financial management, those that make the best chief product officers also have three key traits that set them apart: they inspire confidence, empathize, and are relentless and resilient.
Chapter 9. Organizing Your Teams
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Companies tend to organize in three main ways: value streams, features, and technical components.
You can’t build an organizational structure without a product vision, because the value streams are not apparent.
When organizations lack a coherent product strategy that is ruthlessly prioritized around a few key goals, they end up spreading themselves thin.
Part III. Strategy
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A good strategy is not a plan; it’s a framework that helps you make decisions. Product strategy connects the vision and economic outcomes of the company back to product portfolio, individual product initiatives, and solution options for the teams. Strategy creation is the process of determining the direction of the company and developing the framework in which people make decisions. Strategies are created at each level and then deployed across the organization.
Chapter 10. What Is Strategy?
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When I ask people what their strategy is and they begin reciting their to-do’s, I always ask this follow-up question: “How do you know that this is the right thing to build?” Most of the time, I cannot get a straight answer to that question, or I hear, “I have no idea, but my boss told me to build it.”
Strategy is a deployable decision-making framework, enabling action to achieve desired outcomes, constrained by current capabilities, coherently aligned to the existing context.
Chapter 11. Strategic Gaps
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Instead of seeking more detailed information, upper management should be limiting its direction to defining and communicating the strategic intent, or the goals of the business.
Product teams need the freedom to explore solutions and to adjust their actions according to the data they receive.
Chapter 12. Creating a Good Strategic Framework
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Strategies are interconnecting stories told throughout the organization that explain the objective and outcomes, tailored to a specific time frame. We call this act of communicating and aligning those narratives strategy deployment.
This process of communicating data and direction up and down—and across—the organization is how we maintain alignment. But it needs to first start at the company level.
Chapter 13. Company-Level Vision and Strategic Intents
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The company vision is the linchpin in the strategy architecture. It sets the direction and provides meaning for everything that follows. Having a strong company vision gives you a framework around which to think about your products.
“What is the difference between a company mission and vision?” A good mission explains why the company exists. A vision, on the other hand, explains where the company is going based on that purpose.
the best thing a company can do is to combine both the mission and the vision into one statement to provide the value proposition of the company—what the company does, why it does it, and how it wins doing that.
Chapter 14. Product Vision and Portfolio
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