#product (27 links)
- The Feature Factory: A 10-Year Retrospective cutlefish.substack.com
A thoughtful and much more nuanced view on the feature factory idea, exactly what one would hope for with another 10 years of thought.
The projects → products thing caused a lot of companies to name everything/anything a “product,” over-hire product management, set design/UX back, “install” an “operating model” as if it was plug and play, and generally lose sight of first principles. During ZIRP, even “high performing” product orgs tried to go “multi product” and turned everything into products even when it made absolutely no sense to customers. It also had the effect of turning anything further down the stack (platforms, etc.) into a second-class citizen, or forcing it to adopt customer-facing product language to justify existence. Another thing: teams/companies forcing premature convergence, premature hiring, and premature branding around “new product teams,” when the context was completely off. A lot of layoffs were caused by this logic.
The cost of writing code collapsed, and the cost of reviewing, fixing and operating it is following, and I'm assuming it gets there. What's left of making software is finding out what people actually want, defining it precisely, and making it pleasant to use. That cost is per piece of software and doesn't transfer, so as the amount of software goes to infinity, which it will because there's no ceiling on demand, that cost becomes the whole job.
It is the systematic loss of responsibility, reflection, and intuition. These habits do not stop at the level of the individual. They scale. They become culture. And culture, eventually, becomes politics.
The bet is that discovery won’t start on homepages or even in search boxes, but with AI intermediaries acting on a user’s behalf. As Josh Muncke, vp of generative AI at The Economist Group, told Digiday, the publisher is preparing for “a world with two versions of the web” — one optimized for rich, human reading experiences, and another where “agents want clear structure, questions and answers, ideally text,” not carousels and feature art.
Also...
In areas that touch reader experience, editorial staff are embedded directly in those pods to ensure AI-powered features still “retain the look, feel, style, tone of The Economist,” per Muncke.
- Decentralizing quality matthewstrom.com
Why moving judgment to the edges wins in the long run
- WIP It Real Good | @johncutlefish's blog cutle.fish
- How Linear builds product - by Lenny Rachitsky lennysnewsletter.com
Taste over metrics, product teams over product managers, strategy over OKRs—and the importance of craft, profitability, and good judgment.
This.
- Directly Responsible Individual vs Single Threaded Leader | by Oliver Hu | Keqiu’s Management Notes medium.com
STL is short for Single Threaded Leader. Different from previous approach, this [...] makes the leader exclusively dedicated to a project. The individual ONLY works on this single top level initiative.
- Decoupling OKRs: It’s Time to Let Go eleganthack.com
If you’ve hired great people and given them a clear strategy, you shouldn’t need to approve every little thing. In No Rules Rules, Reed Hastings talks about Netflix’s approach to trust. When you hire incredible talent and make sure everyone understands the strategy, you don’t need heavy-handed control. You can just let go. And if something does go wrong? You deal with it when it happens.
Instead of stakeholders prioritizing their perceived solutions (features and projects) and providing these in the form of a roadmap to a feature team, now the product team is assigned problems to solve, and the product team is empowered to discover a solution that is valuable, usable, feasible and viable
- TBM 257: How to Make the Case for Slowing Down to Speed Up cutlefish.substack.com
How can we make the case for slowing down to speed up when we are already going slow, and when shutting things down and starting over is not an option?
- Vibe Driven Development robinrendle.com
It comes down to this annoying, upsetting, stupid fact: the only way to build a great product is to use it every day, to stare at it, to hold it in your hands to feel its lumps. The data and customers will lie to you but the product never will. And most product orgs suck because they simply don’t use the products that they’re building; they ship incremental nothings without direction because they’re looking at spreadsheets all day long filled with junk data nothings.
Via monospaced.
- Amazon Has a Secret Weapon Known as "Working Backwards"--and It Will Transform the Way You Work inc.com
Over the past 25 years, Amazon has transformed itself. What began as an online bookseller has become one of the world's largest retailers. Beyond that, Amazon…
- How we manage plans & features in our SaaS app blog.checklyhq.com
How do you deal with what a user can do on their account in a SaaS app? Can Jane on the "Starter" plan create another widget when she is near the limit of her…
Being a Good Decision Maker Intuitively, being right a lot matters . At the same time, and in contrast, there are often factors outside of our control that…
- The Product Pragmatist – ProductCoalition.com productcoalition.com
How often have you spent time in multi-day planning sessions, created a huge set of goals for the upcoming year, only to circle back a year later to find that…
- Value Prop Workshop: A “State Matrix Audit” daedtech.com
Category: You Asked For It Alright, let’s try something new for this week’s reader question. As regular readers know, I do a “you asked for it” column where I…
Over the years I created my fair share of product strategies, roadmaps and project gantts. I don’t do them anymore. This is what I used to do: This form of…
In a recent article here on the AxBlog I extolled the virtues of the accrual of technical credit and provided several examples of how we think the strategy has…
This meant letting go of pixel-level beauty to create something bigger and harder: a system of elements that work together in harmony in many contexts. The visual style exists to guide the users. When done well, it becomes a language that users understand, so when they encounter a new feature or have a new goal, they already feel comfortable navigating it.
I spent five years working on a mobile news app — first as an editor helping curate and package content and then as a product manager shepherding it through a…
One of the mistakes I see entrepreneurs make is they move to business model before locking down strategy. The way I like to think about this is get the product right first, then lock down the strategy of the business, then figure out the business model.
One of the best articles I've read so far this year.
My definition of a good solution to a complex problem is one that solves the immediate problem, is built to last and generates more potential than it uses.
The more I think about complex problems, the more I get convinced that the built to last part is critical. Almost all failures are caused by not aiming for durability.