THE OPEN SOURCE PRODUCT MANAGER
How thinking of product as an amusement park helps us understand the difference between core, platform and growth product teams.
Product is an evolving field. In the past decade, three distinct flavours of the product team have begun to emerge: the Core Product team, the Platform Product team and the Growth Product team. Understanding what these teams do and how their goals differ is an essential framing for anyone in product. To help explore the role of each team, consider an amusement park.
A successful amusement park is a combination of big attractions that draw people in, and less exciting services such as parking, security and taking payment. Making each of these elements work together seamlessly requires a range of capabilities, approaches and levels of focus. …
THE COMPLETE PRODUCT STRATEGY GUIDE — PART 4
Network effects are a staple of the digital age: the same principles which make them powerful can be applied to strategy and business model design.
Network effects have become a staple of the digital age, underpinning the value propositions of products as varied as operating systems, eCommerce apps and social networks. Many of the same principles apply to strategy and business model design.
What is a network effect?
Networks are systems of interconnected things. A network effect is when the addition of more things to the network increases the total value of the system.
Network effect: (noun) a phenomenon whereby a product or service gains additional value as the number of participants increases.
The quintessential example is the telephone. A single phone is useless. However, for every additional phone added to the network, the utility increases exponentially. …
THE COMPLETE PRODUCT STRATEGY GUIDE — PART 3
Creating a strategy is hard: by avoiding these ten traps, it can be a little bit easier.
Developing and executing a winning strategy is hard. It is a messy, iterative and often experimental process. It must unify multiple considerations from the business opportunity, competitive dynamics and game-theoretic assumptions about how markets will respond. However, many businesses fall foul of a more basic pitfall: unintentionally not doing strategy at all. These unforced errors often result from a misunderstanding of what strategy is. Here are ten of the most common misconceptions:
What Strategy is Not
1. Strategy is not a vision or mission — Visions and missions are descriptions of the hazy future the team is seeking to build. They are great tools to inspire and create purpose, but often fail to answer the question “where do we focus right now”. …
The Complete Product Strategy Guide — Part 2
Top-down business objectives and bottom-up feedback loops allow a strategy to flow: here’s how to make these mechanisms effective.
An organisation’s ability to define and execute a winning strategy is fundamental to their enduring success. However, “doing strategy” is fraught with challenges. Perhaps the hardest to overcome is cascading a strategy throughout an organisation.
For product leaders, this challenge can be particularly acute: how do you create direction and common purpose while empowering teams to deliver autonomously?
This article will outline two mechanisms which create a multi-directional flow of strategy through an organisation. All leaders, and especially Product leaders, should consider these as they act in their role as a bridge between the business strategy and the day-to-day focus of their teams. …
The Complete Product Strategy Guide — Part 1
Strategy is hard: here is a framework which I hope will make it a little easier.
For leaders within many organisations, “strategy” is one of the most challenging aspects of the role. Aligning a team around a vision and empowering them to deliver is hard. It becomes exponentially harder when you must also align yourself within the shifting sands of a corporate structure. If managed poorly, the result is misalignment, confusion and sometimes even conflict.
For product managers, this challenge is particularly acute. Product managers are bombarded constantly with feature suggestions. It often seems everyone has an idea which will significantly improve their product. Most will not. But if care is not taken, product managers can find themselves focusing on the loudest voices in their organisation rather than actual user problems. A coherent, consistent strategy is an antidote to this problem. This series seeks to provide product leaders with the tools they need to develop and deliver their strategy. …
The Open Source Product Manager
The 3 principles I adopted while surfing, which have made me a better product manager.
Ten years ago, I moved to Australia from the UK to start a new job (and take up a new sport). The job, as a strategy consultant, put me on a path which wound its way from mine sites to websites and ultimately my current role as a product manager. But the sport, surfing, has had just as much of an impact on my attitude to life and work.
Lesson #1 Absorb and act
Surfing is competitive, with everyone battling for position to have priority on the wave. If you are in the wrong place, you don’t get the wave; you don’t get to surf. To anticipate where the next wave will be, you have to process a constant stream of data: the movements of other surfers, the conditions, the shapes of incoming waves, the currents and the wind. …
The Open Source Product Manager
Hint — there is more to it than pop-ups and paywalls.
The digital world is increasingly becoming freemium and self-service — from Atlassian to Zoom via the New York Times, Medium and Spotify. As a result, generating revenue is often becoming a core component of the product experience, and squarely within the remit of the product team. But where does one begin when building a product that solves real problems while also guiding potential customers through a decision to buy? Surely there is more to it than annoying pop-ups or paywalling off parts of the experience? …
The Open Source Product Manager
Three questions which capture what is means to be a great product manager.
The product manager is an important role within any technology company. In the most clinical terms, they help organisations discover and build the right products, ultimately seeking to ensure the effort expended by engineers returns a multiple in business value back to their organisation. The responsibility is a big one — the effort of development teams is much more than the millions of dollars they cost to run: it is the opportunity cost of falling behind a close competitor, missing out on a market by being late to the party or burning through your runway and never finding product-market fit.
Given the critical importance of the role, as a product manager how do you know if you are living up to trust your company is placing in you? As a people leader, what framing do you use to effectively coach, mentor and hire into your team? The following three questions capture the essence of great product management and — whether product manager or people leader — provides a useful starting point when tackling the difficult tasks of evaluating performance and mapping development. …
The Open Source Product Manager
The books which have made a meaningful contribution to my thinking as a product manager.
As a product manager, reading is one of the most productive development activities out there. It helps broaden your perspective, discover different ways of working and allows you to see problems in a new light. I generally try to read a few books a month, and I find they often fall into three categories:
- Table reference — books I will reread (in part or full) or find myself referencing back to frequently
- Happy on the bookshelf — books I enjoyed, found useful or which have contributed something to my thinking
- Hidden in the garage — books which didn’t live up to their hype / I didn’t enjoy or find useful / Would have been better as a blog post / Were poorly written / Didn’t translate well to product management (delete as…
The Open Source Product Manager
The benefits and pitfalls of using a North Star to shape your product direction and roadmap — and how to navigate them.
What is a North Star Metric?
The North Star Metric is the one metric which best captures the core value your product delivers for your customers and users. It is invaluable in helping product teams remain focused on delivering long-term value in the face of a constant flow of new ideas, feature requests, cool technology and other shiny baubles. Done well, the North Star should shape decision making at every level and ensure every team in the organisation is aligned around a common outcome.
What makes a good North Star Metric?
A good North Star Metric reflects the value exchange within a product. It should capture the value that is being created for customers or users. However, this value exchange is generally nuanced — and often unique to the company — and therefore so is the metric. …
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