1 tip & 3 resources per week to improve your Strategy, OKRs, and Discovery practices in less than 5 minutes. Explore my new book on realprogressbook.com
🛠️ 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. Explore my new book on realprogressbook.com
Product Practice #417 User Outcomes are Positively Flipped User Problems PUBLISHED Jul 17, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, Last week, I mapped how OKRs connect to the layers of an Opportunity Solution Tree. But especially the Outcome layer deserves its own issue: turning a customer problem into a team-level Key Result. I first wrote about it in 2023, before I had a name for it. Since then, the positivity flip has become one of the most-used tools in my OKR and Discovery workshops, so...
Product Practice #416 How to Connect OKRs to OSTs PUBLISHED Jul 10, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) help you measure strategic progress. OSTs (Opportunity Solution Trees) are a visual structure for connecting solution and problem spaces to business goals. Let me break down how the layers of an OST connect to the practices of OKR drafting and execution: Layer 1: The Outcome Teresa differentiates between business outcomes, product outcomes, traction metrics...
Product Practice #415 Accelerated Context and the Validation Sparring Partner PUBLISHED Jul 3, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, Most of the AI conversation in product management right now is either describing doomsday scenarios, exaggerated improvements, or warning about what might go wrong. But I am more interested in what changes for product teams doing real work. When a product team adopts an AI tool, what specifically changes about their day? What benefit do they keep coming back for,...