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 #406 Why your Company's POV on OKRs matters more than Processes PUBLISHED Apr 30, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, Before I talk with companies about OKR cadences, templates, or tools, I ask them: "What do you expect to change by using OKRs?" The answers take a bit of time. Not because they don't exist, but because OKRs have been treated as a solution without a problem to solve. OKRs haven't been treated as a product, but as a process without purpose. They've chosen a...
Product Practice #405 How to treat Prototypes as Decision-Making Tools PUBLISHED Apr 23, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO From Strategy Choice to Planned Experiments in One Workshop In my upcoming live remote workshop From Strategy to Discovery, I take you from sharpening your Product Strategy, to defining leading indicators for measuring progress, all the way to prioritized assumptions you need to derisk end-to-end. Three 4h Live Sessions - Lifetime Material and Recording Access - Real Results Join...
Product Practice #404 Linked Better Practices over Stacked Best Practices PUBLISHED Apr 16, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, During a recent webinar, someone asked a question I had to think about a bit longer: "What do you do when your strategy is still early, and you're not sure if it's right?" The answer that popped into my head was based on an incredible piece of advice (or admission) I received from a former boss 10+ years ago: No one knows if their strategy is right in the beginning,...