1 tip & 3 resources per week to improve your Strategy, OKRs, and Discovery practices in less than 5 minutes.
🛠️ The Context Matrix
The Context Matrix​Dear Reader,​ Every level of product management involves two areas: creating context and making sense of it. While creating the context partially depends on the environment you work in, making sense of the context mainly depends on the hard skills a product team has. ​ For Product Strategy, the context consists of internal and external data points about the market, your capabilities, how you plan to differentiate, your mission, and long-term goals. Making sense of it means forming the right relationships between these areas, making choices, and communicating and executing these the right way. For setting Product OKRs, the context contains inputs such as the purpose/mission/vision, Product Strategy, Company OKRs, and Roadmaps. Making sense of these means identifying KRs that capture the product from as many angles as possible, describing changes in behavior (Outcomes), and allowing the team to adjust their actions (leading indicators). The context of Product Discovery results from defined goals and strategic priorities, as well as existing qualitative and quantitative insights about your customers. Making sense requires creating a narrative around the problem space, prioritizing the right research questions and interpreting insights, ideating solutions based on proven challenges, and validating before building. Thank you for practicing Product, ​Tim​ What did you think of this week's newsletter?
As a Product Management Coach, I guide Product Teams to measure the real progress of their evidence-informed decisions. I focus on better practices to connect the dots of Product Strategy, Product OKRs, and Product Discovery. |
Product Practice Newsletter
1 tip & 3 resources per week to improve your Strategy, OKRs, and Discovery practices in less than 5 minutes.
Product Practice #375 Bringing Discovery to EngineersWho 'Just Want to Build' READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED Sep 12, 2025 READING TIME 5 min & 47 sec Dear Reader, I've coached product teams where engineering managers push back on discovery work, convinced that buildins is always faster than validating. They might see testing and validating ideas as obstacles between them and shipping cooler and shinier features. And, should you always extend your Discovery to a quarter because "that's how long...
Product Practice #374 How to Go From Customer Problems to Outcome OKRs READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED Sep 5, 2025 READING TIME 5 min & 18 sec Dear Reader, Most teams skip the hardest part of creating OKRs: translating validated customer problems into meaningful metrics. You've done the discovery work. Your interviews revealed that drivers on your ridesharing platform struggle with shift planning—they can't predict which areas will be busy, leading to wasted time and lower earnings. But instead...
Product Practice #373 Discovery Collaborationis about Skills, not Titles READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED Aug 29, 2025 READING TIME 3 min & 15 sec Dear Reader, Too many people get fixated on “we have to hire these roles to set up a Product Trio” when, in reality, they can get going from wherever they are. Having one representative from each domain of expertise is ideal, but it’s rarely the reality for product teams. So, instead of waiting until everything’s “in place,” here’s how to get going even...