Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results. — George S. Patton I’ve recently written about concrete steps to create a great product strategy, but… a Strategy is truly great only if it is greatly executed. While we can think of execution as “building the […]
Executing Product Strategy like Patton: using OKRs, Comms, and Pivots to succeed Read More »
A 3 step no-BS product strategy process Defining the product’s strategy is a complex problem. But considering all the hard activities companies must do, this is one with surprisingly high failure rates. Furthermore, when we try to learn how to do it right, we find plenty of material about strategy, that is full of “motivational” or
Why do companies suck at Product Strategy? (and how to fix it) Read More »
In 1945 Picasso created probably his most famous set of bull drawings, called “The Bull”. The collection of 11 pictures starts with a series of drawings that start gaining detail and realism in the first iterations. But after the third, it starts moving towards cubism, dissecting the bull part by part, making each piece more
What can Pablo Picasso teach us about Product Strategy? Read More »
By Making Uncertainty Explicit with the Problem, Solution, Delivery framework There is an immense amount of “How to” roadmap articles. I hope this will not be yet another one of those… As a brief introduction, we will probably agree that roadmaps have a series of challenges, including: Communicating with different audiences: how do you use a
How To Make Roadmap Conversations More Strategic Read More »
And ideas on how to overcome them To drive results, alignment and transparency I’ve been using as goal setting tool the now popular OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) for about 3 years, in 3 different companies. And I have repeatedly found similar challenges when setting them. I would have loved to found stories of people facing similar
10 Challenges in Setting OKRs Read More »
When teams face the challenge of prioritizing technical debt, most of them (or at least the ones I have worked with) end up arguing “intangible” value or some variation of “this will benefit us in the future so we can’t really measure it today”. Invariably this makes stakeholders want to avoid this “not-so-visible value” type
How to estimate the tremendous value of technical debt work Read More »
NOTE: This claim is merely based on my experience using OKRs on the last 3 years, and reading/watching a bunch of content on this topic. There are many tips on how to articulate OKRs to make a successful implementation of this goal setting methodology. Setting a small number of goals (2 to 4) With a
One of the most unmentioned factors of successful OKRs — Granularity Read More »
And still isn’t done. Sorry, I have some bad news: things that were not a priority 2 years ago do not magically became a priority as time goes by. There are usually 2 categories: It was not a “top initiative”. In this case, as long as we keep finding better “top initiatives” it will always
“I asked for that 2 years ago” Read More »
