🏛️ The (sort-of) political edition / PM Snacks 61
Learn how to co-operate with your stakeholders to prioritize work, how Notion use their own product, how to add "juice" in your software, and more...
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1️⃣ Prioritization is a Political Problem as Much as an Analytical Problem
May 2022 • 9 min read • #strategy #execution
Like the Marvel movies, you can read the newest Richard Mironov’s article by itself, but it’s even better if you’ve read the previous one: Prioritization Beyond Algorithms. After acknowledging how much you need to “convince” and “co-operate” with your stakeholders, he shares tactics to get them onboard (from ill-efficients to good ones). For example:
- Setting an explicit top-down allocation of effort across a few broad categories (and type of works).
- Pushing every exec to provide a short ordered list of their dpt’s needs, (different from an exhaustive list of all their projects)
2️⃣ The problem-solver’s playbook: 17 questions to sharpen your thinking
Jun 2022 • 12 min read • #execution #beginner
A pretty straightforward & handy list of questions to make sure you don’t overlook anything. My favorites questions are:
- #6 What happens if you do nothing? This is by far one of the best ways to avoid working on unimportant problems. In most scenarios, nothing much happens!
- #13: Where is the point of diminishing return? To answer this one, you should be able to measure success. When you’ll reach your outstanding metric, you may need to work on the next big thing.
- #16: What is the smallest chunk of value we can deliver? Always build & deliver the simplest solution first. Bring impact to users as soon as possible & validate your assumptions by doing so.
- #17: Am I the best person to solve this? I’m sure you are talented but probably your peers are too. Get to know them, and leverage your whole team’s strengths.
3️⃣ How Notion built a product management system to align every team
May 2022 • 10 min read • #execution #tool
I love using Notion. And even more, studying how they are work on such an ingenious product. This article packed with ready-made templates should satisfy you, even though it is better suited for bigger companies (+150 people). Some highlights:
- Weekly product updates - the CPO publishes an update in plain English for the whole company. The format: “what’s shipping”, announcements & FYI.
- Components teams - it’s interesting to note that they organise themselves by platforms and/or components (visible when you explore their templates). Not so surprising when taking into account their “famous” technical debt, ambitious roadmap and how optimised everything should be.
4️⃣ The World's Most Satisfying Checkbox
Jun 2022 • 7 min read • #design #emotion
This team has, since its inception, been pushing the envelope on what it means to create beautiful, satisfying & emotional softwares. In this article, they explain in great details how they designed the core action of their habit-forming mobile app: a checkbox used once a day. They drew inspiration from games to create “Juice”, blending instant feedback through animations, sound design & haptics. Why? 1/ to make a stand, 2/ because their main competition is the satisfaction we feel when we strikethrough an item on paper!
⏳ Customer Problem Stack Ranking
Apr 2021 • 5 min read • #userresearch
Most clicked link, shared one year ago in PM Snacks 37.
We all know that biases are common when doing user research and avoiding them is difficult. One mistake I've made multiple times is to ask leading questions when I wanted to focus on a specific problem that I had in mind. For example: "Do you experience XXXX issue while using this product ?". The issue with doing that is that you anchor the user on this specific item (= the answer ends up being out of proportion). Instead you should use the CPSR. Believe me, it will save you months of work!
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A warm welcome to the 69 new subscribers, we are now 2095 readers strong!
Thank you for reading this far.
Have a great week!
Olivier Courtois
10y+ in product, co-founder of 🥕 uku.wtf, coach & advisor
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