🏹 Beyond MVP, Arc craftsmanship, and effective product team structures / PM Snacks 79
🏹 Beyond MVP, Arc craftsmanship, and effective product team structures / PM Snacks 79
Rethinking the Startup MVP • 4 Effective Product Team Structures • Arc: a product that shouldn’t work • Pinch to summarize • Stop using product roadmaps and try the GIST Framework instead
Hey everyone,
I’ve been working on an AI 1-pager but I’m not happy with it just yet. The angle would be something like: “why you should care about this new technology as a product builder?”. The current outline is:
While I’m researching for it, do you have any questions? What would you like to learn about AI?
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1️⃣ Rethinking the startup MVP: Building a competitive product • Feb 2024 • 9 min read • #execution
I could not agree more: the MVP concept needs to be retired/updated. In a nutshell, the Linear team explains that “the modern MVP exercise is about building _a version _of an idea that is different from and better than what exists today.” Since almost every industry has several dedicated softwares nowadays, to enter a market you need to ship something usable and differentiated. The new method:
1/ Focus the product on a narrow audience & pick an angle
2/ Use waitlists to select the users you accept in your beta program
3/ Ship fast, not just to validate but to compete
4/ Ask users to pay as soon as possible
2️⃣ 4 Effective Product Team Structures • Jan 2024 • 8 min read • #leadership #org
In my coaching sessions, I’m often asked how to organise product teams. Beyond my go-to answer (it depends ^^), I’ll now help the mentees come to their conclusions answering 2 simple questions:
1/ Should the teams be organized by outcomes or features? Most early-stage companies should be organized by features to ensure nothing gets overlooked (scopes have been distributed). In my experience, it’s a safer default because outcomes requires a strong understanding of business impacts as well as a good data maturity. As a result, outcomes work best in more mature companies.
2/ Should the product role be to own or to facilitate? This one depends heavily on the staffing, the industry and how central the product is to the company. Owning works best if cross-functional partners have limited availability, while facilitating is ideal when other roles can be fully provide dedicated time to the product and shared accountability.
3️⃣ Arc: Lessons from a product that shouldn’t work • Feb 2024 • 5 min read • #strategy #design
If you have been reading this newsletter for a while, you may have noticed that I closely follow The Browser Company’s work (= their storytelling and design craft is outstanding, read the next article to discover their latest news). One thing that was bugging me is to understand how they can even exist? Browsers are boring pieces of softwares, commoditized and controlled by a handful of tech giants.
According to this article, it comes down to questioning assumptions (= the internet’s job-to-be-done has changed, many people now work exclusively in web apps) and deriving from its first principles (= browser will be the new operating system / computers).
4️⃣ Arc: introducing pinch to summarize • Mar 2024 • 3 min read • #design #AI
I don’t know yet if the summarization feature will stick with users (seems to “dumb” to me) but the level of craft is inspiring. Open this other thread to discover some of the designs they tried.
⏳ Why you should stop using product roadmaps and try the GIST Framework • Feb 2018 • 7 min read • #execution
Most clicked link one year ago in PM Snacks 69.
The author explains why he no longer uses product roadmaps (=it’s usually a waterfall process that enables its creation) and suggests the GIST Framework as an alternative. The GIST Framework consists of
- Goals: start with your OKRs and/or strategy. Focus on outcomes rather than solutions. For example: increase to 25% of key actions performed on the mobile app.
- Ideas: describe 1 to 3 hypothetical ways to achieve these goals. Possibly work on it with your stakeholders, as well as your squad. I’d advise not to keep ideas in a backlog (since it’d become ever growing quite fast).
- Step-projects are experiments that test the ideas and are no more than (10) 6 weeks long (or even faster).
- Tasks are the individual steps that needs to be completed to finish the Step-projects.
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Olivier
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About → Productverse is curated by Olivier Courtois (10y+ in product, startup co-founder, coach & advisor). Each issue features handpicked links to help you become a better product maker.