Your five product management snacks #5
I'm Olivier Courtois, Head of Product @ comet & Startup Advisor. You are receiving this email because you signed up to productverse, a weekly newsletter about Product Management. Thank you for being here. If this email was forwarded to you, subscribe here
1️⃣ 7 Ways to Elevate Product Thinking • Dec 2018 • 8 min read
This article helped me evolve my thinking while at ManoMano. Rather than understanding the underlying issues and determining the best way to address, we can often fall into familiar thinking, applying pre-made solutions. I especially agree with the part on estimates (= useless for most teams) & user stories as a way to better collaborate #culture #impact
2️⃣ Guide to Product Planning: Three Feature Buckets • Jul 2009 • 4 min read
In order to plan your product features, you need to assess why you prioritise them and create balance between categories. The author use three buckets: metrics movers, customer requests and customer delight. It reminded me of Gibson Biddle (Netflix) who also use three buckets: delight customers, hard to copy, margin-enhancing. It's a very simple framework but helpful to execute on your strategy #planning
3️⃣ Why Figma Wins • Jun 2020 • 17 min
Very good explanation of why Figma was obsessed with building a browser-first tool (not a cloud-first one), and how it created a cross-side network effect. By removing all the usual barriers around design tools they actually brought non-designers into the design flow & gave designers a seat at the table of decisions. Doing so they actually unlocked a very powerful growth loop and built a hard to copy advantage (quite long but worth reading to progress in strategy) #strategy #growth
4️⃣ Why you should build features users don't ask for • Jun 2020 • 5 min read
Pitch is creating a very awaited/innovative powerpoint replacement: a well known use case & software market. As a result they talk about the limit of interviewing users to find true opportunities. They argue that shadowing users or "drinking your own champagne" drive more results. I couldn't agree more, seeing the real desk of your users (I'm in a B2B market), other softwares they use, how they use yours is way more insightful, and free of the biases they would have spoken with #ux #method
5️⃣ From productivity p*** to mindful productivity • Aug 2020 • 6 min
I've collaborated with many Product Managers who suffered from what I could call the "superman syndrome": unrealistic expectations, too many tasks, bad allocation of time, thus leading to them being miserable. Actually it was not their fault: the system is broken and myths like the "miracle morning" are vivid. Anne-Laure Le Cunff gives advice to be productive and still be a "simple human" #mindfulproductivity
See you next week!
Olivier
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