Vision vs. Strategy
Separates where a product is going from how the company plans to get there. Worth twenty minutes before a planning cycle, because teams that merge the two end up with a vision made of delivery dates.
Writing on product work that we keep coming back to, gathered from across the internet.
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Separates where a product is going from how the company plans to get there. Worth twenty minutes before a planning cycle, because teams that merge the two end up with a vision made of delivery dates.
A one week time box aimed at a single substantial risk, plus the three situations where that structure earns its place. Useful when a team is learning discovery and needs a container with a start and an end.
Definitions for the measures investors ask about, grouped into business, product engagement and presentation. The closing section on chart tricks is quietly the most useful, because it shows how a number can be technically true and still mislead the reader.
Perri names the pattern where an organisation measures itself by how much it ships and loses track of what any of it was for. The line about building being the easy part is the one people quote, and the piece around it earns the quotation.
Rolling a change out to a small slice of users before everyone gets it, with the routing and capacity questions that come attached. Pairs naturally with feature toggles if you are assembling a release strategy from first principles.
An outcome first roadmap format built from goals, timeframes, features and metrics. Pichler holds the feature column to a handful of items per goal, and that constraint is what stops the artefact drifting back into a release plan.
Written at Netscape in 1996 and still the most-quoted description of the job. Sets out the difference between owning the product and reacting to whoever asked last.
The origin of the three overlapping circles of business, technology and user experience. Eriksson is clear that the role lives in the intersection rather than owning any one circle, which is the nuance job descriptions tend to drop.
A one page template covering vision, target group, needs, product and business goals. Pichler advises picking the riskiest square on the board and testing that assumption before the team commits to building anything.
Stopping a test the moment it looks significant can inflate the false positive rate several times over, and Miller shows the arithmetic behind that. Short, precise, and it settles the argument about peeking at results for good.
Splits debt along two axes, prudent against reckless and deliberate against inadvertent. Handy when you need to show a stakeholder that some shortcuts were a business decision while others point at a gap in skills or review.
Written in 2009 and still the clearest account of how a dated feature list creates the very problems it was meant to solve. Cagan separates product, portfolio and external roadmaps, which is what most roadmap arguments are actually about once you unpick them.
The article that introduced story mapping, with the backbone and ribs structure teams still draw today. Patton's point is that a flat list loses the shape of the thing you are building, which turns release planning into guesswork.
Ten questions to answer before an idea gets funded, opening with the problem it solves and closing with a decision to proceed or pass. Cagan notes that teams find the first question hardest, because they reach for a feature where a problem statement belongs.
North traces how behaviour driven development grew out of teaching test driven development, and where the given when then template came from. The cash machine example is still the clearest short illustration of the idea.
The source of the INVEST acronym, along with the SMART companion for tasks. Wake's case for slicing stories vertically so each one carries customer value is why the checklist has outlasted almost everything else written that year.
Nielsen's model shows a single participant surfacing roughly a third of usability problems, with returns falling away quickly after that. The practical conclusion is to run three small rounds with a redesign in between rather than one study with fifteen people.
Ten broad principles derived from analysing 249 usability problems, unchanged since 1994 and still the common vocabulary of interface critique. Vague feedback in a design review usually becomes specific the moment someone names which heuristic is being broken.
Separates the Scrum accountability from the product management job, which is the distinction most job descriptions blur.
The source of the RICE model, including how Intercom defined the confidence bands rather than leaving them to instinct.