8 items tagged “productmanagement”
2021
Allo shows the ultimate failure of Google’s Minimum Viable Product strategy. MVP works when you have almost no competition, or if you are taking a radically different approach to what’s on the market, but it completely falls on its face when you are just straight-up cloning an established competitor. There’s no reason to use a half-baked WhatsApp clone when regular WhatsApp exists.
— Ron Amadeo # 25th August 2021, 10:28 pm
2020
The value of a product is the number of problems it can solve divided by the amount of complexity the user needs to keep in their head to use it. Consider an iPhone vs a standard TV remote: an iPhone touchscreen can be used for countless different functions, but there’s very little to remember about how it works (tap, drag, swipe, pinch). With a TV remote you have to remember what every button does; the more things you can use the remote for, the more buttons it has. We want to create iPhones, not TV remotes.
— Adam Wiggins: Heroku Values # 3rd December 2020, 9:25 pm
The Bias-for-Building Fallacy is most common in orgs that worship speed. That’s fine, but if you go speedily in the wrong direction, you will end up in the wrong place. That’s why teams should value velocity much more than speed: velocity being a combo of speed & direction.
— Shreyas Doshi # 26th September 2020, 2:07 pm
Quite simply, it’s the product manager’s job to articulate two simple things:
What game are we playing?
How do we keep score?
Do these two things right, and all of a sudden a collection of brilliant individual contributors with talents in engineering, operations, quality, design and marketing will start running in the same direction. Without it, no amount of prioritization or execution management will save you.
— Adam Nash # 20th July 2020, 8:33 pm
22 Principles for Great Product Managers (via) By Alex Reeve, a PM at LinkedIn. These are really strong—I particularly liked the “leading your team” section which emphasizes ensuring your team understand the goal and the path to reach it, and that you know what winning will look like and how to tell. # 20th July 2020, 8:17 pm
Working Backwards: A New Version Of Amazon’s “Press Release” Approach To Plan Customer-Centric Projects (via) I’ve long wanted to give the Amazon “future press release” trick a go—start a project by writing the imaginary press release that would announce that project to the world, in order to focus on understanding what the project is for and how it will deliver value. Jeff Gothelf has put a lot of thought into this and constructed a thorough looking template for writing one of these that covers a number of different important project aspects. # 2nd June 2020, 3:54 pm
2019
Lessons from 6 software rewrite stories (via) Herb Caudill takes on the classic idea that rewriting from scratch is “the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make” and investigates it through the lens of six well-chosen examples: Netscape 6, Basecamp Classic/2/3, Visual Studio/VS Code, Gmail/Inbox, FogBugz/Wasabi/Trello, and finally FreshBooks/BillSpring. Each story has details I had never heard before, and the lessons and conclusions are deeply insightful. # 19th February 2019, 9:55 pm
2010
Why is software effort estimation still based on thumb rules and gut feels? How come no one has come up with an accurate estimation model?
For a truly accurate estimation, you need to have built the software before. If you’ve built it before, why are you building it again?
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