Untrapping Product Teams · David Pereiera · 2024
Conventional wisdom suggests avoiding newly published books. Instead, we’re meant to wait and see which ones endure beyond the initial hype to become classics. I think this book will go the distance - it’s a great read for product leaders.
Key Points
If your conditions aren’t ideal, don’t become a victim of your circumstances. Instead challenge the status quo and begin a step-by-step transformation approach
Which of the two types of product development best describes your company?
Coordinative → Energy is focused on organising work and coordinating teams to avoid mistakes and failures, creating rigidity and fear of blame. Agreeing on a plan becomes the goal, as the strategy is unclear.
Collaborative → Team members collaborate to uncover opportunities and create value for customers and the business. They are flexible in their approach, focusing on driving value. Trust is key, people take responsibility and find solutions when issues arise. Teams start with simple plans, adapt based on evidence, and are guided by an overarching goal to create value.
How fast can you drop bad ideas? Dropping ideas creates space and freedom for promising ones. Expect to drop 50% of ideas quickly. Investing time in testing critical assumptions will help you decide what ideas are worth pursuing. Always look for evidence of desirability.
Reality check: How many of these do you see? Output over outcomes. Opinions over evidence. Prescriptive roadmaps over embracing the unknown. Meeting deadlines over achieving goals. Implementing solutions over solving problems.
The key ingredients of product management are strategy, discovery and delivery. Without a product strategy, teams struggle to make decisions and become disempowered. Without product discovery, failures will be costly. Product discovery acts as the glue between strategy and delivery.
Product Strategy simplifies decision making by telling us where to focus.
Who → Define who you’re serving and who you’re leaving out.
Why → Give the context while connecting it with your vision.
What → Define what you envision achieving and name what’s intentionally left out.
How long → A time frame is necessary to facilitate deciding on suitable options.
Product Discovery helps you learn what’s valuable and quickly drop ideas that don’t survive a confrontation with reality.
Product Delivery should be about creating outcomes. Shipping features at lightning speed isn’t a sign of delivering value, it shows only that you’re efficient in creating output. Elements of meaningful product delivery:
Start small and evolve gradually
Focus on outcomes
Create opportunities to collect feedback.
Dare to discard a solution when it creates no value.
Collaborate instead of coordinate.
Judge delivery by the value you’ve created from it
We want to achieve a balance between discovery and delivery. Excess delivery results in a cluttered product with many features that create no value. Excessive discovery can manifest in analysis paralysis and a failure to place bets. Aim for balance, have part of the team invest about 80% of its time into discovery and the rest into delivery, while the rest of the team do the opposite. A simple way to get started is by listing and testing key assumptions, and sharing the evidence with your team and stakeholders.
Four key elements to product strategy:
Product Vision: A compelling vision inspires and motivates the team. Without a sense of purpose, teams get lost because they don’t know what they’re fighting for.
Lean-Canvas: can help highlight critical assumptions for testing.
Value-Curve: helps you clarify how to differentiate form the competition
Eliminate → Define what you don’t offer
Reduce → Select a few attributes to emphasise less
Raise → Define attributes you want to increase the value
Create → Start something unavailable in the market
Roadmap: The link between delivery and strategy, establishes clarity on what to achieve.
Provide directions and not instructions.
Use outcomes not outputs, else you risk forcing the team to implement solutions instead of solving problems.
Use ‘Now, Next, Later, Trash’
Now → Your focus for one to three months. Don’t commit to initiatives but rather outcomes
Next → Relevant aspects you might work on after you finish the critical ones.
Later → We can’t predict 6 months out, so this is whatever you’re considering working on only after you finish Now and Next. Often there’s less evidence for these.
Trash → what you won’t do, drop ideas unrelated to your strategy.
Four steps to craft empowering roadmaps:
Priority: Agree a high-level direction with leadership (e.g., growth, retention, profitability).
Future: Clarify which outcomes are needed next. Drop non-essential initiatives.
Team: Get the product team to craft and commit to goals for the upcoming months
Agreement: Present roadmap suggestions to leadership for buy-in. Aim for alignment, not overcommitment.
Often, your job is to simplify what everyone else is complicating.
Product discovery helps you learn when you’re wrong and uncovers unforeseeable opportunities to create value.
Biases are common in product, mechanisms that help us drop bad ideas quickly help mitigate them:
Confirmation bias transforms weak evidence into reasons to build full-blown solutions. Falling in love with a solution is one of the most common traps.
Commitment Escalation: The more investment we make into something, the more we’re willing to invest.
Sunk-Cost Fallacy: When a past decision compels further investment. Spend too long prioritising, and you’ll find you really don’t want to drop the winning idea (even if evidence is weak).
Bandwagon Fallacy: Following others without knowing why.
Don't focus on the competition: it distracts from customer needs, causes inconsistency, creates technical debt, demotivates employees, and leaves you vulnerable to disruption.
Focus on ‘Value Drivers’ that create value for customers and the business. To uncover the value drivers, you must learn from end users and understand the business. The closer you are to them, the better.
A strict discovery process doesn’t work, because it’s about the journey not the plan. The Discovery journey:
Clarify the Goal: Define the ultimate objective to provide clear direction and purpose.
Understand Your Audience: Learn what resonates with customers to tailor strategies effectively.
Uncover Value Drivers: Story Mapping, Journey Mapping and Opportunity Solution Trees can help you uncover opportunities.
Prioritise & Focus: Address one value driver at a time to use resources efficiently and meet goals, avoiding overextension.
Deal with Assumptions: Identify and test assumptions by writing them as expected behaviours. Use David J. Bland's assumption matrix to prioritize and test critical assumptions quickly.
Use Evidence to Progress: Run experiments to test assumptions, invest in what works, and drop bad ideas based on data. Follow these steps: define methods and success criteria, prepare materials, execute experiments, and evaluate results.
Reinvent the Future: Involve the whole team in ideation, exploring multiple solutions to avoid commitment escalation.
With discovery journey you don’t get stuck with phases → you can go back and forth as much as necessary as you search for value drivers and drop bad ideas.
Avoid vanity metrics and velocity metrics.Your backlog should be leading metrics you want to move, not outputs. This helps make the team accountable for outcomes. Focus on what success looks like and work backward.
Results alone aren’t enough. They need context. That’s where storytelling comes in handy
Be on the right side of these:
Collaboration vs Coordination: Collaboration focuses on adapting quickly, while coordination follows strict processes, limiting flexibility.
Independent vs Dependent: Dependent teams lack the skills required to transform an idea into value. Independent: Have all the skills required to transform an idea into value. Independent teams deliver value faster.
Essential points for creating empowered teams:
Remove dependencies between teams.
Encourage collaborative flow.
Implement dual-track agile approach.
Have a readiness to embrace the unknown and foster a growth mindset.
Common Product Management Mistakes. Behaviours on the left indicate the product manager has become more of a backlog manager:
Writing detailed backlog items vs. uncovering value drivers
Accelerating output vs. maximising outcomes
Opinion-driven decisions vs. evidence-driven decisions
Planning by capacity vs. empowering to pursue goals
Trying to please everyone vs. building partnerships
Making compromises to avoid conflicts vs. solving conflicts without compromises
A product owner is an accountability in Scrum, whereas product manager is a job. The product manager should carry full responsibility from end to end.
Product principles can accelerate decision making and align team actions.Example principles:
Strategy: Focus on goals, avoid distractions, take risks.
Discovery: Build to learn, prioritise evidence over opinions.
Delivery: Measure impact, simplify, accept good enough.
Collaboration: Align with stakeholders, solve current problems first.
Run a company health check every six months - look for progress across the following key aspects:
Good leaders empower teams, guide rather than command, and take responsibility for failures. Bad leaders make all decisions, control everything, and blame others for failures. Leaders should create spaces where teams can thrive and bring their best selves to work.
Product teams should be treated as key business members, not a support area. Empowered teams interact directly with customers and determine which problems to solve. Product teams should have a seat on the management team to avoid wasting energy on non-value-creating activities.
Teams should be able to create value independently without coordinating technical dependencies. Focus on progressing rather than coordinating activities with other teams.
Risk avoidance stifles innovation; organisations should balance risks and opportunities. Optimistic teams say yes to challenges and transform opportunities into reality, while pessimistic teams default to no and slow down progress. Innovation requires taking risks and embracing small failures to discover outstanding ideas.
Characteristics of sustainable product delivery:
Build to learn first, then make it right. Focus on learning first, then scaling.
Focus on maximising results over features.
Remove features that don't contribute to value.
View failures as steps toward success, treat them as learning opportunities
Fill the backlog based on current goals, not past promises. A cluttered product backlog hinders learning and opportunities. Keep the product backlog focused on future goals.
Avoid tech debt by starting small and acknowledging unknowns.
Quick Links
How to commit to launch dates the right way · Video
European Accessibility Act requires culture to shift! (A11y) · Article
Become an A/B Testing Expert: Advanced Topics in Testing for PMs · Paywall Article
Rodney Brooks' Three Laws of Robotics · Article
The Eric Schmidt video Youtube took down at his request · Video
Situational Awareness - The Decade Ahead · Paper
The importance of reaching a point in your day when you feel finished · Video
ImageNet: A large-scale hierarchical image database · Jia Deng et al · 2009
The explosion of image data on the Internet has the potential to foster more sophisticated and robust models and algorithms to index, retrieve, organize and interact with images and multimedia data. But exactly how such data can be harnessed and organized remains a critical problem. We introduce here a new database called “ImageNet”, a large-scale ontology of images built upon the backbone of the WordNet structure. ImageNet aims to populate the majority of the 80,000 synsets of WordNet with an average of 500–1000 clean and full resolution images. This will result in tens of millions of annotated images organized by the semantic hierarchy of WordNet. This paper offers a detailed analysis of ImageNet in its current state: 12 subtrees with 5247 synsets and 3.2 million images in total. We show that ImageNet is much larger in scale and diversity and much more accurate than the current image datasets. Constructing such a large-scale database is a challenging task. We describe the data collection scheme with Amazon Mechanical Turk. Lastly, we illustrate the usefulness of ImageNet through three simple applications in object recognition, image classification and automatic object clustering. We hope that the scale, accuracy, diversity and hierarchical structure of ImageNet can offer unparalleled opportunities to researchers in the computer vision community and beyond.
Open datasets are a great multiplier of science and research. For whatever reason - they don’t seem to get much press or acclaim, but I suspect that will change in future. ImageNet provided a spark that revitalised AI.
Book Highlights
Better yet, determine how far along users are in the PQL criteria, so you can rank them on how close they are to being qualified (a.k.a. a product engagement ranking model). This is how the sales team starts moving.
Ramil John and Wes Bush · Product-Led Onboarding
Strong leadership skills are also needed to keep a team focused and to push to accelerate the tempo of experimentation moving forward, even in the face of the (entirely to be expected) regular failure of growth experiments. Dead ends, inconclusive tests, and abject duds are a part of the reality of growth experimentation. A strong growth lead keeps enthusiasm going, while providing air cover for the team to be experimental and fail without undue scrutiny and pressure from management to deliver more wins.
Morgan Brown and Sean Ellis · Hacking Growth
It’s assumed that item similarity is stable, so item similarities can be calculated beforehand or offline.
Kim Falk · Practical Recommender Systems
Reducing the thinking required to take the next action increases the likelihood of the desired behavior occurring with little thought.
Nir Eyal · Hooked
When we’re searching for something, our field of vision can narrow to as little as 1 degree or less than 1% of what we typically see. This narrowing of our field of vision has been compared to a spotlight or zoom-in lens.
Dan Saffer· Microinteractions
Quotes & Tweets
Three ways of reframing price: · Shorter time frame: **** $1261 / year → $3.45/day · Smaller Units: ****$720 for the team → %5 / employee · Comparison: $12 / week → 3 lattes ☕ a week
Harry Dry
No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.
Daniel Kahneman
The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values and agenda of an entire generation that is to come.
Steve Jobs
So much can be accomplished in one focused hour, especially when that hour is part of a routine, a sacred rhythm that becomes part of your daily life.
Dani Shapiro