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Product Practice Newsletter

1 tip & 3 resources per week to improve your Strategy, OKRs, and Discovery practices in less than 5 minutes.

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🛠️ How to Build a Product Strategy That Fits Your Company’s Focus

Product Practice #336 How to Build a Product Strategy That Fits Your Company’s Focus READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED Oct 4, 2024 READING TIME 3 min & 14 sec Dear Reader, Besides being decisive, another attribute that can determine the value of your Product Strategy is how layered it is. The best way to think of the interplay between the Company and Product layers is the magnitude of overlap between each of them: Is the audience you chose for your Product part of the prioritized audience by the...

Product Practice #335 How to Stop Saying Yes to Everything in Your Product Strategy READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED Sep 27, 2024 READING TIME 3 min & 35 sec Dear Reader, Three weeks ago, I shared with you Why you don’t get Value from your Product Strategy. Today, we're going to talk about the How. Making your Product Strategy decisive means making choices that help answer "What does this allow us to say no to?" Imagine a b2b SaaS Analytics software called Analytico. If your Product Strategy says...

Product Practice #334 How I use OKRs to Write my Book READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED Sep 20, 2024 READING TIME 3 min & 59 sec Dear Reader, When thinking about measuring the success of writing a book, it's relatively easy to land on metrics like No. of copies sold within a period of time The average ratings on amazon The no. of people pre-ordering or signing up to be notified upon book launch Generated indirect revenue from inquiries or follow-up products sold The problem with these metrics is...

Product Practice #333 You’re Not a Better Product Manager Because… READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED Sep 13, 2024 READING TIME 2 min & 32 sec Dear Reader, Are you at Product at Heart today? Find me for a chat whenever you're in the mood. I love meeting readers in real life. Short one from me this week. Let's get it! I'm a big fan of getting better in context over working towards an absolute "best." But what helps you get better comes in different shapes and forms. Here's where some of these forms...

Product Practice #332 Why you don’t get Value from your Product Strategy READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED Sep 6, 2024 READING TIME 4 min & 26 sec Dear Reader, It’s tempting to focus the start of your strategy creation on a framework or by-the-book advice. Have you filled out the canvas? Cool! Does it meet all the "Good Strategy" criteria? Great—let’s move on. But that’s a pattern of Alibi Progress: prioritizing technical correctness over everyday value. Whenever Product Strategy feels like a tick...

Product Practice #331 What does it taketo talk to customers? READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED Aug 30, 2024 READING TIME 4 min & 29 sec Dear Reader, Together with my friends at Orbital (a company I advise), I recently ran a LinkedIn poll about user interview behaviors. My goal was to get a rough overview of how product teams approach preparing customer interactions. Here’s what I learned from the 320 total votes: Who schedules your customer interviews? Most (55%) of participants schedule interviews...

Product Practice #330 The Problem with 0-1 Metrics READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED Aug 23, 2024 READING TIME 3 min & 51 sec Dear Reader, Scaling Product Discovery requires more than just having teams talk to more users. In fact, just having teams interview more users without structure and some baseline education might do more harm than good. Here’s what I took away from training over 30 product trios at The StepStone Group: #1 Educate Cross-functional, wherever possible It doesn’t make sense to...

Product Practice #329 The Problem with 0-1 Metrics READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED Aug 16, 2024 READING TIME 4 min & 18 sec Dear Reader, Welcome back! I hope you had (or still have) a relaxed or eventful (whatever your preference is) summer. I enjoyed the time off and being in places that filled me up. Among others, the baltic see. Which is where I captured one of my favorite summer shots: Before we jump into today's issue, I want to share three things from friends that I believe you should be...

Product Practice #328 My 2024 Mid-Year Review READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED Jun 28, 2024 READING TIME 5 min & 20 sec This is the last newsletter before my annual summer writing break. I will return on August 16th after next week's issue. In the meantime, follow me on LinkedIn for more hands-on content. ☀️ Dear Reader, I first encountered the concept of a mid-year review via Tiago Forte a few years back. After I published 7 Things I Learned from Writing a Weekly Product Management Newsletter for...

Product Practice #327 How Product Leaders CanGuide Their Team's OKRs READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED Jun 21, 2024 READING TIME 3 min & 51 sec This is the second-to-last newsletter before my annual summer writing break. I will return on August 16th after next week's issue. ☀️ For the scope of this essay, I will define Product Leaders as members of a Product Management function with people management responsibilities (e.g., Director of Product, Head of Product, VP of Product, etc.). Product leaders...