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.
Answers the practical questions a team hits when it sits down to write a vision, including how many years out to aim and who owns the drafting. The nine factors Cagan wants considered in a vision workshop make a usable agenda on their own.
Most artefacts presented as a product vision turn out to be a mission statement. Cagan lists what a real vision has to do for the people building the product, and explains why it usually arrives as a video or a prototype rather than a filled-in canvas.
The argument for treating work in progress as an organisational limit rather than a team one. Cagan uses Pandora and his own years at HP to show what happens when twenty initiatives are all described as critical, and he quotes Rumelt on concentrating resources on very few pivotal objectives.
Cagan sets out the four things a product strategy has to do, from picking the few objectives that matter through to managing the work once it is under way. Read it when your organisation has a roadmap and a set of objectives but nothing that explains why those are the bets.
Opens a series on the fits a company needs beyond product and market, taking in channel, business model and the market again. The description of the product death cycle will land with anyone whose growth plan is really a list of features.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
On the requests a product should decline and how to explain the decision without relitigating it every quarter.
The full book, free online. Six-week cycles, appetite instead of estimates, and shaping work before it reaches a team.
What changes structurally when a company moves from project delivery to empowered product teams.
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.
A collaborative technique for connecting a business goal to the actors who can move it, the behaviour changes you want from them and the deliverables that might produce those changes. The site carries the method, worked examples and the book, all under a Creative Commons licence.