Since it's the planning time of the year, and there's a good chance you are either using OKRs or thinking about adopting OKRs right now, we thought it would be fitting to talk about OKRs in this edition!
📊 OKR Anti-Pattern: Using Measures Of System Behavior - Jeff Gothelf
System behavior can look a lot like human behavior when you reduce both down to metrics. However, system behavior is a feature of your product. It helps you determine to what extent you’ll implement that feature. It doesn’t, however, tell you whether or not you’ve delivered value.
💬 The Roundtable Debate: How Do You Set Product OKRs? - airfocus
Last year, we held a hugely popular roundtable with Robin Zaragoza, Bernhard Hacker, and Kent McDonald on setting product OKRs. We discussed the benefits and the potential pitfalls of OKRs, when the OKRs framework does not work, and how to write good OKRs. Make sure to check out the report of the debate!
🎭 How Product Teams Can Move On From OKR Theater - Tim Herbig
By focusing on vanity metrics instead of measuring the solving of proven user problems, you jeopardize creating success for the business and your users. Let’s take a look at how to recognize OKR Theater — and how to ensure your team is focusing on the right things.
⛓️ How to Align OKRs to Roadmaps - Kent McDonald
OKRs help you put some metrics around the problem you’re trying to solve. Roadmaps help you communicate the things you’re going to use to reach your outcome. How are the two related and how can you align them?
📻 An Inside Look at How Figma Builds Product | Yuhki Yamashita (CPO of Figma)
In this episode, Lenny talks with Yuhki about operationalizing quality, the case against OKRs, and how Figma isn't just known for product-led growth, but also for building a community of empowered users. A very insightful episode overall, and interesting takes on OKRs at 40:50 if you want to skip to that part!
A helpful thread by Teresa Torres on how to differentiate OKRs and Outcomes!
Jan 19th: 5 PM CET / 4 PM GMT / 11 AM ET
Webinar: The Product-led Growth Guide - Show, Don't Tell - Leah Tharin
Feb 8th: 3 PM CET / 2 PM GMT / 9 AM ET
Webinar: Building a Product Management Talent Strategy - Anthony Murphy
We dedicate the last Digest edition of the year to the AI topic, because who is NOT talking about AI in the past couple of weeks?!
We are bringing you some opinions from the thought leaders in the scene, together with our favorite product song written by AI!
📊 Prediction on 2023 Product Trends - Emilia Korczynska
"I've never seen Product People being so unanimous about anything - but this year, when I asked top Product Managers and Marketers to share their opinion on the upcoming 2023 product trends, almost everyone mentioned AI."
🤖 Prediction on 2023 Product Trends - according to ChatGPT
Inspired by Emily's post, we at airfocus also asked ChatGPT - the hottest artificial intelligence chatbot these days - about its "thoughts" on product trends in 2023 and this is what we've got.
🎨 Exploring the Power of OpenAI ChatGPT for product designers - Edward Chechique
It is more than evident that AI technology will change how product designers work. In this article, Edward demonstrates some use cases for product design using the new ChatGPT.
📍You need an AI transformation manager, NOT an AI product manager - Kevin Dewalt
As the business landscape slopes up toward AI Abundance, we need an additional specialized role to address the unique challenges of AI transformation.
📻 The Ethics of AI in Product Management - Ammar Jawad
From one of the foremost leaders in the machine learning field, Ammar Jawad breaks down his thoughts on topics like psychology in product, machine learning in the tech industry, and the ethics of artificial intelligence.
✒️ Wise words from Saeed Khan.
🎤 A product management song by "Eminem"?? We have to share this with you.
Jan 19th: 5 PM CET / 4 PM GMT / 11 AM ET Webinar: The Product-led Growth Guide - Show, Don't Tell
Jan 27th: 6 PM CET / 12 AM ET / 9 AM PT Webinar: Developing a Strong Product & Design Sense with Bob Baxley
The human factor plays a huge role in a product's success, but is rarely talked about enough.
We are bringing you some top articles about product team empowerment this week, along with an insightful video from Marty Cagan.
💼 Why And How To Create Empowered Product Teams: An Actionable Guide - Kerstin Exner
Many companies will claim that they have a strong product management discipline, but if you look under the hood, this is not always true. The ones that do usually outperform their competitors in innovation, speed, quality, agility, and adaptability. All of these are critical in a fast-changing world.
📍 Self-similarity and Manager/Leader Accountability (for Cross-functional Teams) - John Cutler
The key point here is that having "cross-functional teams" is all well and good. But these teams are a mirror of the managers they report to (which mirrors the incentives in place). If the managers cannot collaborate, the team will have trouble collaborating.
🚧 Why Groups Struggle to Solve Problems Together - Al Pittampalli
There are five stages of problem-solving: defining the problem, generating solutions, evaluating solutions, picking a solution, and making a plan. When we solve problems on our own, we intuitively move in between these stages to generate solutions quickly.
🗝️ Open Your Product Development Process to Your Team and Stakeholders - Hilary Johnson
A well-thought-out product development process is key to creating and launching meaningful products. You’ll certainly be more effective with your process if you involve key team members and stakeholders at the right times.
⚔️ Product vs Design vs Tech: A Partnership, not a Battlefield - Anthony Murphy
In high-performing teams, each individual has a deep sense of responsibility to the team and ownership of the product. They participate and yearn to understand more about the different aspects of product development.
📽️ Achieving Extraordinary Results with Ordinary People - Marty Cagan
Marty has had the extremely good fortune to be able to work with many of the very best technology product teams in the world. What he has learned is that there is a profound difference between how the very best product companies create technology products, and the rest.
The r/productmanagement subreddit shares advice on how to deal with an underperforming team.
The Team that Managed Itself: A Story of Leadership - by Christina Wodtke
How do you build the right team and choose the goals to pull them to greatness, even if you’re dealing with a toxic environment? How do you keep your people moving in the right direction without burning out or burning it all down? Leading so well that your team learns to manage itself?
Learn how from this book by Christina Wodtke. You can order your copy here.
Dec 14th: 5pm CET / 11am ET / 8am PT Webinar: How Miro Scales Delivery and Discovery
Dec 16th: 6pm CET / 12pm ET / 9am PT Webinar: Take Back Your Power & Special Afterparty
Inspired by *gestures wildly at everything* whatever is going on at Twitter, we decided to dedicate this Product Digest edition to the topic "Product leadership".
Want to read others' opinions on the current state of product management at Twitter? We've got you too!
70 percent of the workers questioned believe they would be happier at work if they had a better relationship with their managers. In comparison, 60% feel they would be more productive.
💅 The Highest Paid Person's Opinion (HIPPO)
Many people in the position to give out HIPPOs got there by being right, a lot. They developed and delivered successful products and services and helped grow the business to where it is today. None of that matters when it comes to a new initiative.
📍 Product Leadership: The Four Pillars
Sometimes we get caught up in the “management” portion of our profession and lose track of moving toward “leadership.” Management is about execution. Leadership is about inspiring others to follow you and bring your vision to life.
📚 How to Apply Product Thinking to Your Entire Organization
Applying product thinking to your organization doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a habit and mindset. This means having an ongoing and collective effort. It can be challenging to know where to start, especially if your organization, team, or stakeholders are new to this approach.
⛰️ Crossing the Canyon: Product Manager to Product Leader
What got you here, won't get you there. There is a core reason why the step to Product Leader is the hardest; it's an almost completely different job requiring several new abilities like product strategy.
📻 How To Unlock Your Product Leadership Skills
Ken Norton, an executive coach and an ex-PM at Google for 14 years, shares with Lenny Rachitsky his deep experience in leadership and the lessons he most often offers his clients to unlock growth.
More than a hundred PMs shared their opinions under this thread. Don't miss the discussion!
Product managers, what's your view of how @elonmusk is leading twitter?
— JustAnotherPM (@JustAnotherPM) November 20, 2022
EMPOWERED: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products (Silicon Valley Product Group) - by Marty Cagan and Chris Jones.
Bill Campbell - a legendary Silicon Valley coach - once said, "Leadership is about recognizing that there's a greatness in everyone, and your job is to create an environment where that greatness can emerge." This book shows you how to become that empowering leader.
A perhaps popular but fitting choice for this week's recommendation! You can order your copy here. Tip: The Kindle version is on sale for Black Friday!
Nov 30th: 5pm CET / 11am ET
Roundtable Discussion: Setting Product Ops up for Success
Dec 7th: 3pm CET / 9am ET
Webinar: Fundamentals of Successful Product Management: The 3 Non-Negotiables
Dec 14th: 5pm CET / 11am ET
Webinar: How Miro Scales Delivery and Discovery
Happy Product Digest weekend!
This week we'd like to share a mix of insights on Product-led growth (PLG) with you, especially when it comes to a B2B environment.
📚 Introduction to PLG and The Role of the (B2B) Product Manager
The B2B product manager has a central role in collaborating, coordinating, and communicating with all teams to create a coherent and compelling product. This is very similar to how product management in B2C companies has been operating for years.
✍️ How to Win With Product-led Sales
Everyone wants the best of both worlds: low CAC with product-led (PLG) and high ACVs with sales-led (SLG) growth models. But implementing both is tricky as they utilize different channels, monetization strategies, growth loops, and even internal resources.
💬 Inside Hotjar’s Bootstrapped PLG Strategy
"The biggest misconception I see about product-led growth is people assume it's about product and that's a bit of a reduction." - Hotjar CEO Mohannad Ali shared how the company bootstrapped to $50M+ with PLG.
🎈 What Makes a Strong Product Culture?
A product-focused company will naturally create a product culture around it, resulting in an environment that delivers for the product managers, engineers, sales and marketing teams, and customers.
💻 The Importance of Data Quality For Product-led Companies
Data touches every aspect of a PLG company, from personalization to strategy. But if the success of the business depends on data, then poor data quality directly impacts the top and bottom lines.
📻 How to Unsuccessfully Launch a PLG Motion
In this podcast, Wes Bush - author of the popular book "Product-led Growth" - discusses a different approach of ideas and insights about how to be successful in building an unsuccessful launch of a product-led growth motion!
Read Elena Verna's full post here.
Mastering Product Experience (in SaaS): How to Deliver Personalized Product Experiences with a Product-led Strategy by Mickey Alon and Nick Bonfiglio.
This book points out the limitations of conventional marketing techniques for SaaS businesses and explains how a thought-through data infrastructure can help design delightful personalized product experiences to acquire and retain users.
You can order your copy here.
Welcome to the newest Product Digest issue! This time we're fastening substantially on product design. If you or your friends are trying to navigate through product design topics feel free to share this newsletter.
📚 The Art of Designing a Product
In this article, the author goes through the product design process and explains all of its stages.
📚 UX Design and Product Roadmaps: Here’s What You Need To Know
When product design and User Experience considerations come together, we get the UX roadmap. Read the article to learn more about it.
📚 Designing for "Delight" Is Dead
The ultimate goal of product design has to be well-being — not delight. One of the last articles from the pen of an innovation optimist Alex Klein.
🎥 UI/UX Design vs Product Design
In this video you will learn What is Product Design, What is UI/UX Design, How UI/UX design is different from Product Design, Product Designer Salary and a lot more!
Malte Scholz via LinkedIn
In Designer's Guide to Product Vision: Learn To Build Your Strategic Influence To Shape the Future authors (Laura Fish and Scott Kiekbusch) help you navigate fast-changing product journeys―iteratively and continuously improving experiences while staying aligned with your mission and purpose. Interesting book for every product designer.
Feel free to order your copy here.
Welcome to the next Product Digest issue! October's edition will bring you to the exciting world of product strategy. If planning is something you want to learn more about feel free to start with the video below and deep dive further into the articles.
📚 The 5 Product Innovation Mistakes and How To Avoid Them
What are the main reasons why product innovation fails? In this article, you will find the 5 reasons that the author sees as the most common and some thoughts on how to address them.
📚 Practical Guide To Defining a Product Strategy
Once you have your mission and vision statement clearly identified you can engage in defining a clear strategy to execute that vision. Check out this article to know more information.
📚 Common Product Vision Board Mistakes
The product vision board is a simple yet powerful tool to capture the product vision and the product strategy. Despite its simplicity, effectively using it can be challenging.
🎥 What Is Product Strategy (An Overview)
What is Product Strategy? What does a Product Strategist do, and how can you get started in Product Strategy? Product Strategist Jonathan Courtney gives you a basic overview of everything you need to know about it.
Itamar Gilad via Twitter
Many product managers are stuck between waterfall planning and agile execution. It’s not a great place to be. You’re working incredibly hard to satisfy everyone, but you have no time to do your real job - discover the product that creates most value.
— Itamar Gilad (@ItamarGilad) October 14, 2022
In Strategize: Product Strategy and Product Roadmap Practices for the Digital Age author shared practical advice and valuable examples about product strategy so that you can apply the practices directly to your products. Comprehensive and insightful, the book will enable you to make the right strategic decisions in today’s dynamic digital age.
Feel free to order your copy here.
Have you ever been confused about the product vision and company mission? You are definitely not the first one but after reading the article from Inês Liberato you will understand these two concepts much better. Feel free to pick your favourite Saturday reading from the ones below.
📚 Company Vision vs. Product Vision
Today we would like to bring you the concept of product vision and how it works within the company context sometimes also called company (vision) mission.
📚 Putting It All Together: Vision, Strategy, Roadmap, and OKRs
Set of actionable advice on vision, strategy, roadmapping and OKRs. If you are new in a product space then this article can give you a nice overview.
📚 Creating Product Strategy with Multiple Strategic Tracks (MuST)
Product Strategy is hard. For most tech companies their first big product success is also their last. Finding a second hit is very hard no matter how much we invest in vision and strategy development. The core business somehow always generates 90%+ of revenue and engagement.
🎥 Product Vision vs. Product Strategy: What's the Difference?
Differentiating Product Vision vs. Product Strategy is not just about semantics. If you understand the difference between them, you can actually use Product Vision to help drive bold choices in Product Strategy.
Itamar Gilad via LinkedIn
In Vision to Value: How to Structure Tech Companies to Deliver Great Products author shared his tips and ideas on how to guide leaders in technical operations towards setting up product development structure, customer support, developing business processes, and organizing teams, while highlighting many of the issues contributing to organizational failure, and some approaches to solving them.
Feel free to order your copy here.
This week we focus on Product Ops. Emerging role in a product management industry but not everyone knows much information about it. Feel free to watch the video with Marty Cagan and read other articles.
📚 Product Operations: The COO of the Outcome-Focused Product Org?
Are you looking to move into product ops or evaluating if your team could benefit from it? Here are some of the basics behind what product operations does, how it fits in, early wins, and more!
Product ops, referring to product operations, supports a cross-functional product team to constantly ensure and improve their efficiency. Do you want to learn more? Check this article from Clement Kao.
📚 Product Operations: From zero to one
"...in many ways, a product ops team functions as a miniature product team — the product process is my product, and the product team are my users. Therefore, my success in product ops hinges on my ability to understand the needs of my users, the product team, and align around shared goals for the improvement of my product — the product development process." This is how Joshua McLaughlin thinks about Product Ops. Do you want to learn more from him?
🎥 Marty Cagan on Straight Talk About Product Ops at Lean Product Meetup
Marty Cagan gave "Straight Talk About Product Ops" talk at Lean Product Meetup on January 20, 2022. See the video below.
In Product Management in Practice: A Practical, Tactical Guide for Your First Day and Every Day After author provides real-world guidance for current and aspiring product managers. Updated for the era of remote and hybrid work, this book provides actionable answers to product management's most persistent and confounding questions, starting with: What exactly am I supposed to do all day?
Feel free to order your copy here.
We are all in a product space so knowing the basics of how to run and work effectively in modern product teams can help us to build better products. Have fun reading the articles and tell us your experiences with managing product teams.
This article addresses the process side of running a product team. If you are in the stage of building or running one click here to learn a more structured way of doing product management.
📚 How to Level-up Your Product Team: The Three ‘Ps’
This article provides a framework to move your product team forward and ‘level-up’ your capability. It can be helpful for everyone who stays in a product some time already and need to move forward faster.
📚 Product Team Basics - How To Set Up a Reporting Hierarchy
Setting up a product team requires deep knowledge of what product management is and how it works. It’s challenging to set up your product team and organization to work together. Getting them to apply the right level of product thinking to solve the right problems even more. You need to understand how strategy fits together with discovery, marketing, and implementation.
🎥 Product Group Approach to Team Structure
A short video briefly explaining how you can structure your future product team to deliver the best performance and results.
John Cutler via LinkedIn
In Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams authors present interviews with nearly 100 leading product managers from all over the world. Authors Richard Banfield, Martin Eriksson, and Nate Walkingshaw draw on decades of experience in product design and development to capture the approaches, styles, insights, and techniques of successful product managers.
Feel free to order your copy here.
Welcome to a new issue of our Product Digest newsletter. Today we have picked for you some articles about products and processes - especially focusing on product development. Have fun reading and tell us which article you specifically enjoy.
📚 Behind the 7 Phases of Product Development
There are 7 phases of product development, and each one of them is vital in achieving success in a product. You might have been in the business for a while, but this concerns you. It is not just PM textbook content; these stages have their own implications for your work.
📚 3 Types of Innovation: Product, Process & Business Model
It is important to state the three different ways in which a company can innovate in order to improve its processes and remain relevant. Learn more in this article about the types of innovation.
📚 Skills and Processes To Thrive as a Product Manager
In order to talk about which skills and processes a Product Manager should have, it’s important to take a step back and think in the first place: what does it mean to be a Product Manager (a.k.a. PM)?
🎥 How to Structure Your Product Discovery Process (2020) by Tim Herbig
With all the uncertainty and non-linearity of product discovery, it can be incredibly hard to define your own product discovery process and set up a structure. In this video, Tim will dive into some general advice for bringing structure into your product discovery activities. For more guidance check out his free resources here.
EQ (Emotional intelligence) is not just a nice thing to have for a Product leader. It's essential to creating a powerfully collaborative Product practice. Read more about Product EQ and how to develop it, here: https://t.co/6U97wLSsz7
— Kate Leto (@kleto) August 2, 2022
In Productize: The Ultimate Guide To Turning Professional Services Into Scalable Products Eisha Armstrong writes about her 25+ years of experience that she has in successful creating, launching and growing productized services. Eisha knows what works and what doesn't and she is passionate about making sure organizations learn from each other and avoid reinventing the wheel.
Feel free to order your copy here.
Welcome to the next edition of Product Digest. In previous issues, we spoke a lot about the relationships between PMs and Developers and this time we will explore another product role which is undoubtedly an important element of every product team - let's have a look at designers.
📚 Designers + Product Managers: Navigating Tension and Role Fuzziness
Product management and design are quite well-defined disciplines “on paper”. On the battlefield, however, things are different, and what we actually bring to the table is incredibly fuzzy. More information inside the article from Thiago H. Dalcin, Berlin-based designer.
📚 Who Are Product Designers in the New Age
The design industry has evolved and has been growing over the last few years. The term designer is changing along with the landscape of design. There are numerous designers in the digital space frequently performing the same role as product managers but with different titles.
📚 Google’s Heart Framework for Measuring UX
If you’ve been struggling to adopt useful metrics in your user experience team – you might want to consider the HEART framework designed by Kerry Rodden, Hilary Hutchinson and Xin Fu, from Google’s research team.
🎥 Heart Framework: Choosing the Right Metrics for User Experience Value
The Heart framework is a great tool for designing discussions for product teams. In conjunction with the goal signal metrics process, it brings business metrics into your design process.
Itamar Gilad via Twitter
The average company defines many goals, but pursues just a handful of "winner" ideas.
— Itamar Gilad (@ItamarGilad) July 4, 2022
The best companies set very few goals, but evaluate and test many ideas.#productmanagement #OKRs
In The User Experience Team of One : A Research and Design Survival Guide Leah Buley prescribes a range of approaches that have big impact and take less time and fewer resources than the standard lineup of UX deliverables. Whether you want to cross over into user experience or you're a seasoned practitioner trying to drag your organization forward, this book gives you tools and insight for doing more with less. Feel free to order your copy here.
Here we are again with the next issue of Product Digest. This week we are bringing you a bunch of interesting articles and content about the value. You can learn what it is, why you should strive to maintain and grow it and if you are looking for more actionable content, then check out our 5-minute guide "How To Use the Value vs Effort Model".
📚 Product Management Means Creating Value
The product’s value proposition succinctly communicates the benefits for your users and how you’re superior to your competitors. If you want to learn more, this article is full of information about product value.
📚 10 Tips for Product Owners on (Business) Value
There is a lot to talk about regarding the subject of ‘value’, and therefore, this article written by Robbin Schuurman covers 10 tips about value.
📚 How To Use the Value vs Effort Model
In this 5-minute guide, learn when and why to use the value vs effort model to prioritize initiatives and focus on items that will have the largest impact based on their goals and effort.