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Product Practice Newsletter

What to think about on a Slow Summer Friday

Published 21 days ago • 2 min read

What to think about
on a Slow Summer Friday

PUBLISHED

Aug 7, 2026

READ ON

​HERBIG.CO​

​Dear Reader,​

This newsletter is going to be a bit different. I hope many of you have a chance to enjoy a well-deserved break or at least are preparing for it.

I'm in the midst of some quality time off and wanted to use this Friday to simply reach out, say hi, and leave you with one really good reading recommendation to consider (which you can always find below).

Next week I will be back in your inbox with a mid-year review, and until then, wishing you nothing but the best!

Thank you for Practicing Product,

​Tim​

Ways we can work together

1️⃣ Order my book: Real Progress: How to Connect the Dots of Product Strategy, OKRs, and Discovery, which readers call "a practical guide you can return to again and again."

2️⃣ Learn how to go from Strategy Choices to De-risked Assumptions in my 3-day Live Workshop, where you'll work with assembled strategy components, enabling a clear no and prioritized assumptions, and how to test them.

3️⃣ Join the 1-day Workshop The AI-Powered PM: From Hype to Agentic Application I'm co-teaching with Julia Bastian, to cut through the AI noise, run better AI-assisted discovery, and build your first agents and automations for the highest-leverage tasks in your work and your team's sphere of influence.

4️⃣ Learn about my in-house training and coaching options for product teams, with a focus on creating strategic clarity, setting pragmatic goals, and implementing real-life discovery practices to reduce risk

​

If you consume one thing this week, make it this...

Prioritisation Is a Conversation, Not a Score

A number gives you a snapshot in time. It doesn’t give you the detail to have a proper discussion about how long something takes to build, how long it takes to reach the market, and therefore how long before it returns any value at all. This is where the model fails us. You can have an experiment that is designed and built inside a single sprint but takes six months to deliver value, and another that takes two or three sprints to build but delivers value within a week. RICE has no real way of surfacing that trade-off, and it certainly doesn’t help a group collaborate on the decision. I’ve come to prefer working through value and impact, then effort, then time to value as separate layered conversations, because it forces the team to negotiate together rather than defer to a formula.

Who is Tim Herbig?

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

Turn Product Theory into Pragmatic Application by Tim Herbig

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

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