💊 Be responsible like a doctor, prioritise from customers' insights, announce product changes & more / PM Snacks #26

Start behaving like a doctor and assuming your responsibilities as a PM, discover customer driven prioritization frameworks and more

1️⃣ The Hippocratic Oath of Product Leadership
Apr 2020 • 6 min read • #ethics #productculture
Last week I shared the best Jeff Bezos' wisdoms while acknowledging issues his company creates. It got me thinking about our responsibility, not as consumers but as Product Managers. Software is eating the world, our choices will impact people lives and we need to own it. We can't continue to iterate our way out of MVP without even trying to address the issues we create, hopeful that laws will change for the best (thank you France btw). Here is my first attempt to address it through the words of this author sharing an OKCupid example. She promotes a way of working that starts with a clear vision of the changes we want to see in the world (not only business). You will also learn about a canvas called the Radical Product Toolkit.  

2️⃣ Customer-centric Prioritization Frameworks: Level-up from MoSCoW and RICE
Feb 2021 • 6 min read • #execution #roadmap
We are mid-feb, you are probably working on your next roadmap. Here is an exhaustive overview of the prioritisation frameworks that could help you include customers JTBD. None is better than the others, the choice depends on your company's culture (how much autonomy does the product team have?), consumers (B2B or B2C), stage (are you mainly doing feature work? growth work? expanding to adjacent users?), context (are you raising money? looking for a PR event?)...

So remember: using such a framework only helps to clarify your thinking, align people and promote a product culture. It is only as helpful as the quality of the prep work you did beforehand: continuous discovery, product vision, etc. 

3️⃣ How to Successfully Introduce and Announce Product Changes
Dec 2020 • 12 min read • #marketing #customercentric 
Building the product is obviously the fun part. Seeing users really engaging with it, is the reward. But in my experience, how you get from one to the other is usually overlooked. We end up releasing it and hoping for the best.. In this article, you'll find a few recipes to announce your product changes in the proper way.

4️⃣ How to Eat an Elephant, One Atomic Concept at a Time
Feb 2021 • 20 min read • #strategy
Last week I shared why Invision is (probably) failing: lack of clear strategy, a product built on the leaders' missing features. Here is a new take: they overlooked the shift in the use cases and targeted the wrong "atomic" concepts. Adobe or Invision are having a hard time to reinvent themselves for: 
1/ new specialised use cases like designing for UX/UI, social network artworks
2/ designing when you're not a designer: templates & community features, compounding into a network effect
3/ designing in teams: not manipulating pixels or vectors in a file but components in projects

It's a long read but I highly recommend it for people eager to learn more about product strategy. It will probably give you a new lens to look at your product. Don't hesitate to be like Sebastian (who shared with me this article) and send your links here (or just hit reply).

5️⃣ The spectrum of synchronousness
Feb 2021 • 6 min read • #communication #productivity
One of the clearest piece of writing on the different ways to communicate in a team. The main advice: shift right (in the suggested spectrum). Another way to say it: go async as much as possible, record as much as possible. My favorite tools: slack thread & bots for regular time dependant prompts, loom & meetings recordings, notion for wiki/documentations. 

❇️  How to update the founders' vision on arrival & get away with it
Feb 2021 • 15 min listen • #discovery
Last week I got featured in a new French podcast : Clef de voûte (15min to discuss a real problem & how the PM solved it). I talked about discovery through a comet's example. Some of the tools I mentioned: 5-whys, opportunity tree, insights database, zapier, slack. Here is what such a database looks like: 
- You record all the feedbacks: surveys, slack messages, interviews
- You review them & tag what users complained about, loved or their unmet needs
- You generalise these tags & use them as raw material for your roadmap
- I did it in Airtable but any tool will do (Productboard or Dovetailapp) 
   
A warm welcome to the 40 new subscribers, we are now 1459 readers strong!

Thank you for reading me.
Have a great week!

Olivier Courtois 
10y+ in product, currently coach, advisor & podcast host

//

How would you rate this week's content?
😍Great  ∙  🙂Okay  ∙  🤯Meh