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
Brand is about what people aspire to be — a good mom, a capable leader, an innovator, eternally young — and the best ones make us feel good about ourselves. The emotional aspects of brand are often underinvested in by technology companies because it doesn’t directly correlate to sales. This is where small actions can add up to a big difference.
— Loved: How to Rethink Marketing for Tech Products (Silicon Valley Product Group) by Martina Lauchengco
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
Core values are the organization’s essential and enduring tenets — a small set of timeless guiding principles that require no external justification; they have intrinsic value and importance to those inside the organization. “The core values embodied in our Credo might be a competitive advantage, but that is not why we have them. We have them because they define for us what we stand for, and we would hold them even if they became a competitive disadvantage in certain situations.” The key point is that an enduring great company decides for itself what values it holds to be core, largely independent of the current environment, competitive requirements, or management fads.
— Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by Jim Collins, Jerry I. Porras
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