Writing on product work that we keep coming back to, gathered from across the internet.
Every title opens the original on the publisher’s own site. We point at this writing and credit the people who wrote it. We do not host it.
Pricing and packaging advice organised by market type, from consumers through undifferentiated small businesses to sophisticated buyers, each with a real case behind it. McKenzie treats pricing as the easiest lever in the company to move, then says how often to move it.
A catalogue of branching patterns and the forces that push a team towards each one, from mainline development through release branches to long-lived integration. Read it when a team is debating trunk based development without having agreed what the alternative costs.
Minimal guidance for Kanban in around ten pages, built on defining and visualising the workflow, actively managing the items in it and improving continuously. Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 and maintained by a named group including Daniel Vacanti and John Coleman.
Recruiting, question design and synthesis in one place, including the interview snapshot Torres uses to share what a single conversation produced. The guidance to ask about specific past behaviour rather than general habits is the change that improves results fastest.
A single page paraphrase of the guidelines under their four principles, perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. The right place to start before opening the full specification, which is long and written for conformance testing.
Two incompatible ways of organising a day, and what happens when they collide in a shared calendar. Graham's observation that one meeting can split an afternoon into two halves too small to use is the line every engineer recognises.
Molly Graham on why growth means handing the part of your job you enjoy most to someone new, and how to do that without feeling robbed. The Lego metaphor gives a team a shared phrase for a transition that is otherwise awkward to raise.
Ties what you can charge per user to the channels able to reach them profitably at that price. Bring it to a pricing conversation, because it makes visible which acquisition routes a given price point quietly closes off.
How Netflix structures cells, allocation and analysis so any engineering team can run a test without building infrastructure first. Concrete detail on what a platform has to provide before self service experimentation is realistic.
A guest post working through why retention outweighs virality for long run user growth, with the arithmetic written out rather than asserted. Pairs well with the retention benchmarks when you are deciding where a growth team spends a quarter.
How the technique runs, why private selection matters and who should hold cards. The list of ways it goes wrong is the more useful half, particularly the habit of averaging the numbers before anyone has explained the gap between them.
The Shape Up chapter that defines shaped work, rough enough to leave the team room and concrete enough to bet on. The dot grid calendar example shows how a scope boundary gets set long before anybody sees a ticket.
Five categories of assumption and four ways to test them, with a clear line drawn between an assumption test and an experiment. Torres also answers the objection about time, arguing that an hour long test beats the perfect one you never run.
Covers the main categories of disability and what each implies for a page, using concrete examples rather than legal framing. A good first hour for a product manager who has never had to think about any of it.
Three kinds of one to one conversation, and how to work out which one you are in before you start solving anything. Lopp's rule that the weekly meeting belongs to the other person is the fix for most one to ones that have gone flat.
Closes the loop by asking whether the market is large enough at the price the business model requires. Read the essays as a set and you have a diagnostic for a growth plan that keeps stalling for reasons nobody can name.
The 2010 paper that introduced HEART and the goals signals metrics process for getting from a product goal to something countable. Still the best answer to a team that picked its metrics because those were the ones already being collected.
A long reference covering unit economics, cohort analysis and the cash flow trough that catches growing subscription businesses. Skok's rules of thumb on lifetime value against acquisition cost get quoted everywhere, and here you get the reasoning underneath them.
Four value statements and seventeen signatures, and the whole thing fits on one screen. Reading the original is worth the two minutes, because nearly every argument about agile turns out to be about the second half of each line rather than the first.
Covers the template, story splitting and the qualities that make a story workable, with examples from several kinds of product. The framing that matters is that the card is a reminder and the requirement emerges in the conversation around it.