1 tip & 3 resources per week to improve your Strategy, OKRs, and Discovery practices in less than 5 minutes.
🛠️ The Context Matrix
The Context MatrixDear 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 #362 The Progress Wheel: My favorite Structure to Connect the Dots READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED May 9, 2025 READING TIME 4 min & 48 sec Dear Reader, Real Progress happens when you choose methods because they create value for you in your context, and you can use each domain to improve the others. To make Real Progress, teams need to understand and practice two core ideas: Putting the value of a practice before the selection of a method or framework is crucial to avoid getting...
Product Practice #361 Connecting North Star Metricsto Business Models READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED May 2, 2025 READING TIME 4 min & 45 sec Dear Reader, In many organizations, there's still a disconnect between product and business metrics. Product teams focus on customer-centric outcomes while business teams chase financial targets, with neither side fully trusting how one drives the other. When done right, a North Star Metric (NSM) can establish a middle ground that brings together both...
Product Practice #360 Why your Product DiscoveryFeels too Theoretical READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED Apr 25, 2025 READING TIME 4 min & 17 sec Dear Reader, Over the past two weeks, I've explored treating Product Strategy and OKRs like products to avoid Alibi Progress. Today, let's tackle the practice that often gets dismissed as "good in theory, impossible in practice" — Product Discovery. When teams tell me "we don't have time for proper Discovery," they're usually stuck in Alibi Progress —...