Over the years working in an agency, navigating my own career and today as a Product Coach I’ve probably onboarded to 20+ different companies now.

Over that time, I’ve refined approaching my first 90 days into 3x 30 days sprints:

• Sprint 1 (first 30 days) = Discovery

• Sprint 2 (30–60 days) = Quick wins

• Sprint 3 (60–90 days) = Establishing trust

Below you’ll find a write up on:

• What is Dual Track (continuous discovery and delivery) and how does it work

• Why you should move away from project discovery towards this model

• The mindset that you need to make it successful

• and common practices that I’ve found helpful

In this week's post you’ll find:

• What is product discovery?

• The 3 Core Components of Product Discovery

• What the definition of done is for discovery

• Why product discovery should help you STOP ideas

• And who does product discovery

Over the years coaching teams and product leaders all around the world, I’ve seen a wide range of different teams.

Teams who weren’t teams at all. More like groups of individuals.

Dysfunctional teams caught ‘spinning their wheels.’

And what you might call high-performing teams where they flow and effortlessly work off each other.

These small, cohesive teams run circles around teams twice their size - even whole departments in some cases!

In this week’s issue you’ll find advice on:

• Ways to implement product stratey in a sales-led company

• Building a business case to sunset a product that’s not performing

• Balancing commercial, customer and tech goals

• Building alignment on your product vision and strategy

• Best questions to ask in user interviews

• and more…

Psychotherapist and relationship expert Esther Perel has this great framing:

"a paradox to manage, not a problem to solve.”

Many aspects of life, business, product, leadership, relationships, etc are paradoxical.

• Strategy vs execution

• Customer vs business impact

• Explore vs exploit

• Realistic vs ambitious

• Take risks vs have security

• etc…

“Deciding to invest in your Product sense is among the highest ROI decisions you’ll make in your career.” - Shreyas Doshi

I want to do two things in this post:

1) Give you actionable ways to build product sense.

2) Explain what the hell Product Sparring is and how product leaders can use it to build product sense in their teams.

4 of the most common Product Discovery mistakes that I see teams make and actionable steps to avoid them and level up your Product Discovery game!

Your OKRs don’t live in a vacuum.

Yet this is exactly how I see many organizations treat their OKRs.

They jump on the bandwagon and create OKRs void of any context.

Here’s what I see all the time…

Did someone say ‘boat’?

…followed by ‘party’…?

You can stop reading. My only takeaway from Leading the Product this year was the boat party!

Ok I’m kidding - here are some of my notes from the day.

Quick one from me. Busy week with:

A late night talk on Breaking Outcomes Down, Not initiatives

and attending Leading the Product conference Sydney.

Here’s the talk and some of my notes from the day!

Here's a hack I use to dealing with stakeholders coming with solutions, rather than problems.

Don't try to work backwards, work forward.

I wrote a post a couple of years back on ‘How to craft your First Product Vision’ where I open with:

“There’s a lot of advice out there on how to write a good vision statement, many will point you to the popular ‘Elevator pitch’ format (among others), but personally I’ve never felt those frameworks were suitable for my final vision statement — you sure don’t see the likes of Telsa, Apple, etc using these kinds of formats for their vision statements, do you?”

“Do you want to win arguments or solve problems?” - Rory Sutherland

You’ve gotta love this quote from Rory Sutherland.

With so much noise in the product industry today, it couldn’t be more relevant.

You don’t need to go far to see comments like "that's not real product management", "that's not agile" or [insert practice X].

While I do believe there’s a place for inspiration and increasing our exposure to what’s possible.

It’s not going to solve any problems.

Deploy = is the process of making software available on a target environment. This could be a production environment, but it also might not be.

Release = is still a technical activity, but it’s where you make the newly deployed changes available to your users.

Launch = is a strategic activity (non-technial) where you inform the market about specific features and changes.

Last week, over 300 passionate product people joined me live for a free webinar on ‘Building Effective Product Roadmaps’ (the recording is below).

I want to share the results of the polls I ran during the webinar and figured, why not do a summary of the key points too.

Let’s get into it!

From my experience, there are two common reasons why I see product backlogs become long and unmanageable.

​A lack of strategy​ and, therefore, backlogs become a dumping ground for any and every idea.

Working big, breaking down big solutions, rather than breaking down the outcome (refer to ​my last post​)

A common pattern I see in many of the product teams and companies I coach is that they’re doing a lot of incremental work but little-to-no iterations.

They have this big idea (often framed as an initiative) and become solely focused on breaking it down. The initiative becomes a series of epics, and that epic becomes a series of user stories, and so forth.

A common challenge organizations face as they scale or when they go down the product transformation route is clarifying roles.

Either it’s caused by the introduction of new roles, like Product Marketing Managers, Growth Product Managers, etc, or having to rebaseline existing roles, like how we think about the Product Manager role.

Quick one from me this week. Instead of a typical post I thought I’d share some of the stuff I’ve been busy with like last week’s Webinar