Resources for product teams from industry experts.
Objectives and Key Results are first and foremost an empowerment technique. The main idea is to give product teams real problems to solve, and then to give the teams the space to solve them. This goes right to the core of enabling ordinary people to create extraordinary products.
— EMPOWERED: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products (Silicon Valley Product Group) by Marty Cagan
Perfection can quickly become the enemy of great. “We don’t yet know who our ideal customers are,” or “We don’t yet know which messages are most compelling.” A period of discovery and trial is essential, but it is equally essential to not wait for definitive data to make the right choice for right now.
Timeboxing is a very simple but tried and true technique of allocating a fixed time period for a planned activity, then assessing whether or not you’ve reached a reasonable outcome at the end of it. It establishes a time boundary at the start of the process, not as a result of the process, and keeps you accountable to moving at the speed markets require.
— Loved: How to Rethink Marketing for Tech Products (Silicon Valley Product Group) by Martina Lauchengco
Building a great product isn’t enough to succeed if you don’t also take the time to position it in the market. Don’t make the mistake of assuming the world knows how to think about your product and why it’s valuable. You must frame its value. If you don’t do it, other market forces will.
That said, positioning a product well is much harder to do than it looks. It’s more than just data, stories, claims, or a positioning statement. It’s the collective outcome of everything you do to bring your product to market over time.
Positioning and messaging are both important and often get conflated with one another. The differences are:
Positioning is your long game. Messaging is your short game.
— Loved: How to Rethink Marketing for Tech Products (Silicon Valley Product Group) by Martina Lauchengco
Whether professionals have a chance to develop intuitive expertise depends essentially on the quality and speed of feedback, as well as on sufficient opportunity to practice. Expertise is not a single skill; it is a collection of skills, and the same professional may be highly expert in some of the tasks in her domain while remaining a novice in others.
— Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
What psychologists do believe is that all of us live much of our life guided by the impressions of System 1 — and we often do not know the source of these impressions. How do you know that a statement is true? If it is strongly linked by logic or association to other beliefs or preferences you hold, or comes from a source you trust and like, you will feel a sense of cognitive ease. The trouble is that there may be other causes for your feeling of ease — including the quality of the font and the appealing rhythm of the prose — and you have no simple way of tracing your feelings to their source.
— Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
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