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Product Practice Newsletter

Turn Product Theory into Pragmatic Application by Tim Herbig

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

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🛠️ MVPs ≠ Experiments

Product Practice #321 MVPs ≠ Experiments READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED May 10, 2024 READING TIME 2 min & 42 sec Dear Reader, Don’t make the mistake of “Let’s test this assumption with an MVP.” I called out MVPs for being too expensive for shortening the lead time towards reducing uncertainty during Product Discovery back in 2017: As Casey Winters defined it, “An MVP is all about delivering value to users by building the smallest product you can to test a hypothesis. You ship to learn, which...

7 days ago • 2 min read

Product Practice #320 Assumptions vs. Experiments vs. Hypotheses READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED May 3, 2024 READING TIME 3 min & 48 sec Dear Reader, “Make sure you treat this as an experiment.” “Our working hypothesis is that people want this.” Are any of these familiar? Your team (or the entire organization) might regularly mix up the terms assumptions, experiments, and hypotheses, which can create confusion at best. Let’s clarify what each of these means. An Assumption is a statement about...

14 days ago • 3 min read

Product Practice #319 A Product Coach Walks into a Bar Full of UX Researchers... READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED Apr 26, 2024 READING TIME 5 min & 01 sec … and says, "I'm looking for actionable insights." The bartender replies, "Well, you're in luck! We serve them straight up, no bias added." (thanks for helping me complete this pun, ChatGPT). Dear Reader, Lately, there has been a lot of (necessary and unnecessary) talk about the collaboration between Product and UX practitioners. Independent but...

21 days ago • 4 min read

Product Practice #318 How does your Traffic Light Strategy look? READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED Apr 19, 2024 READING TIME 4 min & 37 sec Dear Reader, Here’s the good news: Your Product Strategy doesn’t have to be 100% proven and watertight based on evidence before you can start sharing and working on it. Instead of trying to hide the assumptions present in your strategy, embrace them by using what I like to call the “Traffic Light Strategy.” This ties in with the idea that your Strategy consists...

28 days ago • 3 min read

Product Practice #317 From Product Strategy to OKRs READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED Apr 12, 2024 READING TIME <1 min Dear Reader, This week, I conducted a webinar that turned into a mini-workshop with airfocus (Disclaimer: I'm an Angel Investor in them). In it, I used a made-up mock case to work with the audience through making Product Strategy choices within the constraints of a Company Strategy and how to turn these into possible quarterly KRs. Without further ado, here's the full recording,...

about 1 month ago • 2 min read

Product Practice #316 Don't turn Continuous Discovery into Dogmatic Discovery READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED Apr 5, 2024 READING TIME 2 min & 41 sec Dear Reader, When I recently talked to Vivek Kumar for my work-in-progress book, this insight stood out: "The biggest moat you can always have is how fast you can learn." And a recurring theme in a recent Product Discovery workshop was to hold every decision in Product Discovery against "whether it helps reduce lead-time to actionable insights (aka...

about 1 month ago • 3 min read

Product Practice #315 How to Define Metricsfor Internal Products READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED Mar 29, 2024 READING TIME 3 min & 37 sec Dear Reader, Most metrics examples focus on popular and external-facing products. Let's discuss how to define metrics for internal products. I'm a fan of going back to the basics: Any metrics framework should help you measure value delivered to or changes created for whoever your audience is. And guess what? Even internal product teams have an audience: The...

about 2 months ago • 4 min read

Product Practice #314 It’s all Just Metrics READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED Mar 22, 2024 READING TIME 3 min & 09 sec Dear Reader, Let’s retire the idea that OKRs, North Star Metrics, or KPIs are some sort of mystical construct. I’ve written about the difference between these approaches to using metrics. But since then, I’ve seen many teams hide behind the theater these different metrics frameworks can create, getting lost in alibi progress. It’s time to remind ourselves of one universal truth: No...

about 2 months ago • 3 min read

Product Practice #313 How to Go from Vision to OKRs READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED Mar 15, 2024 READING TIME 3 min & 16 sec Dear Reader, Our Vision is for our hometown to be a sporting heritage that creates excitement among fans and business opportunities through our club’s brand. Our North Star Metric is the Number of Attractive Football Seasons Completed. An attractive Football Season requires: the win of at least one international title a player in the top 3 goal-getter ranking of our local...

2 months ago • 3 min read

Product Practice #312 Don't Do this toyour Product Strategy READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED Mar 8, 2024 READING TIME 3 min & 44 sec Dear Reader, Most product teams I meet are held back by one of these three obstacles when creating their Product Strategy. Let’s look at how you can overcome them. Worrying about the Format Product Vision Board, Lean Canvas, Product Field, <Insert Cool Silicon Valley Company>’s Template…the list goes on. But guess what? The format doesn’t matter as much as you think...

2 months ago • 4 min read
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