profile

Product Practice Newsletter

What to think about on a Slow Summer Friday

Published about 7 hours 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 Join my Workshop ​From Staring at KPIs to Prioritizing with OKRs, in 6 Hours, for turning generic dashboard metrics into useful goals, helping you prioritize and measure your work.​
​

3️⃣ Join the Live Cohort of my How to Build and Execute a Winning Product Strategy course, to learn how to set up your own Strategy process that allows you to say no to things and that creates clarity and context, instead of theoretical processes.

4️⃣ Learn about my 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 #419 Decision Journaling YourWay to Product Sense PUBLISHED Jul 31, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, I know, I know. You probably can't hear the term product sense anymore (welcome to the club). But I recently arrived at a non-thought-leader-y practical angle for cultivating it. "Product Sense is the ability to usually make correct product decisions, both macro & micro, even in the face of major ambiguity"- Shreyas Doshi In a recent client workshop, the topic of product...

8 days ago • 2 min read

Product Practice #418 The Essence of Every Mapping Technique PUBLISHED Jul 24, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO 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 Join my Workshop From Staring at KPIs to Prioritizing with OKRs, in 6 Hours, for turning generic dashboard metrics into useful goals, helping you prioritize and measure your work. 3️⃣ Join...

15 days ago • 2 min read

Product Practice #417 User Outcomes are Positively Flipped User Problems PUBLISHED Jul 17, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, Last week, I mapped how OKRs connect to the layers of an Opportunity Solution Tree. But especially the Outcome layer deserves its own issue: turning a customer problem into a team-level Key Result. I first wrote about it in 2023, before I had a name for it. Since then, the positivity flip has become one of the most-used tools in my OKR and Discovery workshops, so...

22 days ago • 4 min read