🎨 Product Strategy & Creative Leadership / PM Snacks 78

Today’s email → How to write product strategy in 1d / 1w / 1mo • From reactive to creative leadership • Building MVPs in 2024 • Spatial Interfaces • Muji's design philosophy "stand"

Jan 23, 2024

Hey everyone,

In Dec, 70% of you showed interest in reading my AI memo. It should be ready next month 🤞. So stay tuned!

In this edition, you’ll find some macro-level content about strategy and leadership, some actionable content about when and how to build a MVP & some food for thought on design.

Disclaimer on the MVP content: I’m lucky enough to have coached Robin for +1.5y, and I know firsthand that he has a lot to offer to the community, which is why I chose to share his multiple endeavours. Btw, I’m looking for new mentee, let me know if you are interested.

To support this newsletter, consider sharing it with colleagues or liking it (tap on the 💙).

1️⃣ How to Write a Product Strategy in 1 Day / 1 Week / 1 Month • Dec 2023 • +15 min read • #strategy #starter
Ed wrote an extensive guide to create and formalise a product strategy based on 7 ingredients:

Objective - what is the challenge we are responding to?
Users - what does our audience need?
Superpowers - where can we create unique value?
Vision - what is the future we are building?
Pillars - what are the main themes of work to get there?
Impact - does our planned work meet our objective?
Roadmap - what are we doing next, and how do we share progress?

It’s well articulated, actionable and a great entry point for a topic that can sometimes feel overwhelming.

2️⃣ From Reactive to Creative Leadership • Jun 2023 • 8 min read • #leadership
Ken Norton shares a model that he now uses in all his coaching sessions (I might start doing the same). It provides a useful framework to understand where many of us fall short. It should resonate with any PM who has found themselves compromising strategy to appease others, stubbornly defending bad ideas, or burning people out with an unsustainable intensity. I’d recommend reading this article to better understand the leaders we work with, and improve our own leadership. If you can read French and want to deep-dive into leadership, I highly recommend the book “la méthode Will” by Pierre Fournier.

3️⃣ Building MPVs in 2024 • Jan 2023 • 5 min read • #execution

If you don’t know Robin Labrot yet, I bet you’ll hear more from him this year. He was the Head of Product of Lempire (the company behind 4 SaaS making +25M€ ARR), he recently started working on his own product to reduce time to insights through AI (here is a teaser). He now regularly shares his learnings about building successful products, on LinkedIn.

On MVPs, I especially value the advice’s breadth, spanning from product development to technical insights and sales strategies.

4️⃣ Spatial Interfaces • Jul 2015 • 8 min read • #design
Apple is starting to sell their take on AR/VR goggles (=Vision Pro) but they forbid you from calling it anything but the first “spatial” computer. As usual, they’re doing a great job at marketing, but spatial interfaces have been around for a while now. This article is a great entry point to understand them. I shared another talk/essay on this topic in PM Snacks #39.

5️⃣ Muji’s design philosophy stand • Dec 2023 • 1 min read • #culture #design
It’s unusually short for me to share it in this newsletter, but I loved this tweet on Muji’s design philosophy 👇

⏳ How to think about Bets, Success Metrics, and Roadmapping • Dec 2022 • +15 min read • #product
Most clicked link one year ago in PM Snacks 68.
Thanks to his former position at Amplitude, John Cutler was lucky enough to work with, and closely observe hundreds of product teams in the world. Good news, he just assembled a book about bets, filled with his usual gems. I highly recommend reading it a few times, especially if you have run into one of these pbs 👇

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A warm welcome to the 40 new subscribers, we are now 3396 readers strong! Thank you for reading this far.

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.