Weblog Archives

Most Recent:

Your OKR Cascade is Breaking Your Strategy (Aug 1, 2025): Most companies cascade OKRs down their org chart thinking it creates alignment. Instead, it fragments strategy and marginalizes supporting teams. Here's what works better than the waterfall approach.
Your Prioritization Problem Is a Strategy Problem (Jul 23, 2025): Most teams struggle with prioritization because they're trying to optimize for everything at once. The real problem isn't having too many options—it's not having a clear strategy to choose between them. Without strategy, every decision feels equally important. With strategy, most decisions become obvious.
Behind schedule (Jul 21, 2025): Your team is 6 weeks late and still missing features. The solution isn't working harder—it's accepting that your deadlines were fake all along. Ship what you have. Cut ruthlessly. Stop letting "one more day" turn into one more month.
VC’s Future Lies In Building Winners (Jun 21, 2025): AI and megafunds are about to kill the traditional venture model, forcing smaller VCs to stop hunting for hidden gems and start rolling up their sleeves to fix broken companies instead.
Should individual people have OKRs? (May 14, 2025): A good OKR describes and measures an outcome, but it can be challenging to create an outcome-focused OKR for an individual.
10 OKR traps and how to avoid them (May 8, 2025): I’ve helped lots of teams implement OKRs or fix a broken OKR process. Here are the 10 most common problems I see, and what to do instead.
AI is Smart, But Wisdom Requires Judgement (May 3, 2025): AI can process data at lightning speed, but wisdom comes from human judgment—picking the best imperfect option when facts alone don’t point the way.
Decoding Product Leadership Titles (Mar 18, 2025): Not all product leadership titles mean what they sound like. ‘Head of Product’ can mean anything from a senior PM to a true VP. Here’s how to tell the difference.
What branding can teach about culture (Jan 8, 2025): Culture is your company’s point of view in action—a framework guiding behavior, even in the unknown. You can’t copy it; it must reflect your unique perspective.
Think Systems, not Symptoms (Dec 15, 2024): Piecemeal process creation frustrates teams and slows work. Stop patching problems and start solving systems. Adopting a systems thinking approach helps you design processes that are efficient, aligned with goals, and truly add value.
Your Policies Aren’t Your Culture (Dec 13, 2024): Policies guide behavior, but culture is the lived norms and values of your team. Policies reflect culture -- they don’t define it. Netflix’s parental leave shift didn’t change its culture of freedom and responsibility. It clarified how to live it.
Lighten Your Process Burden (Dec 7, 2024): Everyone hates oppressive processes, but somehow we keep managing to create them.
Product Add-Ons Are An Expansion Myth (Dec 1, 2024): Add-ons can enhance your product’s appeal but won’t drive significant market growth. To expand your customer base, focus on developing standalone products.
Protecting your Product Soul when the Same Product meets New People. (Nov 23, 2024): Expand into new markets while preserving your product’s core value. Discover how to adapt and grow without losing your product’s soul.
Building the Next Big Thing: A Framework for Your Second Product (Nov 19, 2024): You need a first product sooner than you think. Here's a framework for helping you identify a winner.
A Framework for Scaling product teams (Oct 9, 2024): The people, processes, and systems that make up a product organization change radically as you go through the stages of a company. This framework will guide that scaling.
My Networked Webcam Setup (Sep 25, 2024): A writeup of my network-powered conference call camera setup.
Roadmap Outcomes, not Features (Sep 4, 2024): Drive success by roadmapping the outcomes you'll create instead of the features you'll deliver.
Different roadmaps for different folks (Sep 2, 2024): The key to effective roadmapping? Different views for different needs.
Micromanaging and competence (Jul 2, 2024): Providing feedback or instruction can be seen as micromanagement unless you provide context.
My productivity operating system (Jun 24, 2024): A framework for super-charging productivity on the things that matter.
Great product managers own the outcomes (May 14, 2024): Being a product manager means never having to say, "that's not my job."
Too Big To Fail (Apr 9, 2024): When a company piles resources on a new product idea, it doesn't have room to fail. But failing is an important part of innovation. If you can't let it fail, it can't succeed.
Go small (Apr 4, 2024): The strengths of a large organization are the opposite of what makes innovation work. Starting something new requires that you start with a small team.
Start with a Belief (Apr 1, 2024): You can't use data to build products unless you start with a hypothesis.

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