product management

Writings on artificial intelligence, personalization, recommendations, and the tech industry.

Often when we seek certainty, we close our eyes to the possibility that we might be wrong. The more often we do this, the more probable it becomes that we are. As Annie Duke says “The biggest risk is thinking you have a winning strategy when you have a losing one” However, Risk and Opportunity are two sides of the same coin. We’ll explore how Thinking in Bets improves our ability to learn, and understand. And how this might look different at each Flight Level. Our Guest is Dan Vacanti - https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielvacanti/ Flight Club is hosted by Klaus Leopold - https://www.linkedin.com/in/klausleopold/ and Cliff Hazell - https://www.linkedin.com/in/cliffhazell/ Aug 25th 2021 Join us live on YouTube :) Signup on Meetup to hear about future Flight Club Episodes - https://www.meetup.com/Flight-Club/

“What gets measured gets managed — even when it’s pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organisation…

Put the North Star Framework to action for your product, with guidance on how to set metrics, define inputs, and run a North Star workshop.

Everyone wants to be in an evidence-driven team. But how can you tell if your team is truly evidence-driven, and what does it mean in practice?

Maximizing outcomes and minimizing outputs

© 2015-2020 Jez Humble, licensed CC BY-SA

Product-led teams are cross-functional, adaptable, and make their business their product.

Whether it’s at one of our conferences or meetups, we host events in over 200 cities around the world and love to invite product people to take the stage, share their insights, and push our craft forward. This year we published 102 videos and you watched a staggering 920 days of video on Mind the [...] Read more »

Traditionally, project management is the paradigm used to build digital products. In this talk, we'll start by examining why traditional project management is wholly unsuitable for product development. Jez will then present the principles used to build digital products successfully in the modern lean/agile paradigm. In this session you will find out how to apply impact mapping and hypothesis-driven development to take an experimental approach to product development. We will also explore how practices such as continuous delivery and A/B testing are used to create fast feedback loops to make data-based investment decisions. Conference: http://2016.agileindia.org Slide and Other details: https://confengine.com/agile-india-2016/proposal/1960

At the recent SDC conference in Wellington Prof Philippe Kruchten delivered a talk titled “What Color is Your Backlog”. The thrust of his talk is about bringing a focus on architecturally significant aspects of software into Agile projects, along with delivering the functional components of the system. He uses a color metaphor to illustrate the importance of addressing four types of work.

One of the most common requests I’ve received over the years is to share a good job description for a product manager of an empowered product team.   And for about as long as I can remember, I’ve forwarded on the job description that Google uses.  It’s still a decent description, but I also think it’s... View Article

18 Recipes to help you get stuff done

Your pocket advisor for better decision making. Menta Triage DS helps you with both: the quality of the decision making and the consistency of it.

Are you a product leader, a user experience advocate, or a startup founder who wants to build great digital products? Do you have questions about how to: Better understand your users or customers so that you can deliver an irresistible product? Integrate experiments into your product development process so that you can be confident that […]

I promise this will not be one of those navel-gazing exercises.  This is going to be a very pragmatic article about a critical and fundamental topic. One of the consequences of the popularity of the earlier article on empowered product teams is that it uncovered several significant areas of confusion about product. There are many... View Article

Reprint: R1205E Many companies approach product development as if it were manufacturing, trying to control costs and improve quality by applying zero-defect, efficiency-focused techniques. While this tactic can boost the performance of factories, it generally backfires with product development. The process of designing products is profoundly different from the process of making them, and the failure of executives to appreciate the differences leads to several fallacies that actually hurt product-development efforts. In this article, the authors, an HBS professor and a consultant, expose these misperceptions and others. They look at six dangerous myths: 1. High utilization of resources will make the department more efficient. 2. Processing work in large batches will be more economical. 3. Teams need to faithfully follow their development plan, minimizing any deviations from it. 4. The sooner a project is started, the sooner it will be finished. 5. The more features a product has, the better customers will like it. 6. Projects will be more successful if teams “get them right the first time.” The authors explain the negative effects these “principles” have when applied to product development, offer practical guidelines on overcoming them, and walk readers through a visual tool that will help them keep projects on track.

Overview In recent articles on keys to product success and the alternative to roadmaps I have highlighted that if you want the benefits of product team empowerment and autonomy, then you need to provide each team with the necessary context in which to make good decisions.  I’ve explained that the context typically needs to be the product vision, and... View Article

Build Products Customers Love. The best product companies do it differently than the rest. SVPG will teach you how.

Warning: This document was written 15 years ago and is probably not relevant for today’s product managers. I present it here merely as an example of a useful training document. Good product managers know the market, the product, the product …

Open image in a new tab There has been plenty written over the last year about the need to shift from the world of projects to product-based development. These people – some of whom I provide links to in the further reading below – give compelling reasons for teams and businesses to begin to think…

John Humphrey, the Head of Data Science & Analytics for the Quickbooks Online Platform, talks about how Intuit improved their product insights with Amplitude.

We are all learning how to manage product in the internet age. There have been many successes and failures, and there are still lots more to come. Marty Cagan has worked at plenty of internet successes and failures, including eBay, Netscape and HP. He now heads up Silicon Valley Product Group, where he works with [...] Read more »

Note: Some quick background to this list. At Amplitude (my day job), we help teams build better products. I’ve been super impressed by the…