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
My 2025 Annual Review and 2026 Outlook
My 2025 Annual ReviewDear Reader, This is my last newsletter of 2025. I will return to my weekly writing cadence on January 8, 2026. What I focused on in the second half of 2025After wrapping up the first half of 2025, the rest of the year continued to be a dense mix of experiences. Publishing my Book. It sometimes still feels surreal to see reviews and physical copies of my book. Real Progress: How to Connect the Dots of Product Strategy, OKRs, and Discovery, out there in the wild. I am immensely proud of how the book turned out visually and content-wise, and love seeing what it unlocks for product teams. Talking about my Book. Whether it was at meetups, conferences, in-house company events, podcasts, or guest posts: I enjoyed spreading the word about the biggest ideas that let me work through the last 2,5 years. Continuing to Serve Clients. Across industries and company sizes, I (again) felt grateful for the possibility to having worked with amazing companies and supporting them on their journey to better practices and less Alibi Progress. On a personal note, the definitive highlights of this second half of the year were moving into our new apartment as a family, nature-first explorations of our surroundings, a cooking class in one of my absolute favorite hotels in Weimar, and a profound personal development retreat I attended on the island of Crete. What I will focus on in 2026Besides my public workshops, talks, and consulting work, here are the themes I will prioritize next year: Continuing to Talk about my Book. There are a few exciting podcasts, conferences, and collaborations lined up to spread the ideas of Real Progress further. Portraying Internal or Platform Product Teams. This will be one of my main content themes for 2026: I believe the quality of work happening behind the scenes in many companies is undervalued, and the work of internal teams deserves more recognition and opportunity to improve. If you want to share the story and practices of your internal or platform team, please respond to this email to discuss this. Portraying Teams that Broke the Rules. In the spirit of Real Progress, I want to portray teams that took a framework by the book and bent it to their needs without worrying about "correctness." If this is you, please respond to this email for a chance to appear in my newsletter and blog. Hosting Public Monthly Live Sessions. I enjoy the messiness of thinking through real-life challenges on the go, by connecting them to proven practices. That's why I will start hosting free monthly live sessions that anyone can join. These won't have recordings available and will focus on the live interactions with participants and on working through their questions and challenges. Expect the first date to be announced in early January. Thank you for Practicing Product, and happy holidays to you and your loved ones. I can't wait to see you on the other side. Tim Join my In-Person Workshops in BerlinI'm excited to bring my beloved in-person workshops back to Berlin in January 2026. You can choose between 1-day workshops on Product Strategy, Product OKRs, or Product Discovery, or opt for the full 3-day experience for you or your team.
(reach out for custom team quotes) 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 #426 You don’t need toinvestigate every problem PUBLISHED Sep 18, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, Discovery without direction leads to endless exploration. Teams can feel overwhelmed, believing they must investigate every problem. Your strategic audience choices determine which customer feedback deserves priority investigation, while discovery insights reveal whether your strategic assumptions about customer problems and competitive positioning hold up in practice. This...
Product Practice #425 What Part of YouIs Making the Decision? PUBLISHED Sep 11, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, For much of my career, I’ve helped product teams work through uncertainty. Chilling with my buddy King Arthur at Tintagel Castle I challenged assumptions, introduced frameworks, and helped people make better decisions when there was no obvious answer. While I still love doing that work, I’ve become increasingly interested in a deeper question over the past six years: From where...
Product Practice #424 Linked Better Practices over Stacked Best Practices PUBLISHED Sep 4, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, “Let’s prioritize by value.” Value for whom? That was the question I explored in last week's essay Business Value, Customer Value, and Team Value Are Different Arguments. Today, let's demystify the term value even further. Nothing is inherently valuable. The same opportunity can have different value under different strategies. For that narrative to check out, we need...