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
You Can’t Prioritize by Value Until You Define Its Context
Linked Better Practices over Stacked Best PracticesDear 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 an actual strategy in place. You know my drill: Does it pass the stupidity flip test? Does the strategy feature connected, coherent components? Can you translate it into tangible progress metrics? Without that, every feature idea can be mapped to "more revenue" or "more AI" statements masked as strategies, without providing any context. We're also not here to solve customer problems all day long. As unromantic as it sounds, solving customer problems is a means to the end of generating business value - whether that's revenue, engagement, or a broader economic/environmental impact. It might not always feel exciting to think about solving customer problems this way, but once you start to articulate the value exchange between both levels, you see the necessity of aligning them. And, luckily, if all value layers feel messed up because of your boss throwing around feature ideas like crazy again, know that a good old WHY-HOW-Laddering can get you to the right spot to make progress from at any time: Thank you for Practicing Product, Tim 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 #423 Business Value, Customer Value, and Team Value Are Different Arguments PUBLISHED Aug 27, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, As long as everyone focused on Value you can't do the wrong work, right? RIGHT? Well, as lovely as that sounds, I believe there's a tremendous amount of misdirected focus on value going on in teams. Let's dive into it. Three questions hide behind "value" in most conversations: Did this move a number the business gets paid on. Did customers change...