profile

Product Practice Newsletter

What to think about on a Slow Summer Friday

Published 2 months 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 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

Read more from Product Practice Newsletter

Product Practice #428 Linked Better Practices over Stacked Best Practices PUBLISHED Oct 5, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, Sorry for the slip in sending this one out on Friday. To make up for it, there will be (for the first time ever) two newsletters going out this week. Recently, a CPO told me about an engineer who had used AI to develop a proposal. But when the decisions in it were questioned, the engineer kept referring him back to the output. The CPO wondered how that conversation...

2 days ago • 2 min read

Product Practice #427 Your Strategy names one audience; weak evidence describes another PUBLISHED Sep 24, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, One of the most common questions that came up in my recent Strategy to Execution workshop at the ProductLab conference revolved around intentional strategic audiences vs. reactive chasing of new business. Many teams either operate where the company focuses on all customers of a given market (i.e., "all lawyers") or throw a wishful-thinking segment out...

13 days ago • 3 min read

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...

20 days ago • 1 min read