Posts tagged "Frameworks"

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Customer satisfaction is a hierarchy, not a metric

7 min read

Why do customers churn despite green dashboards? Three layers determine retention: friction (anger), outcomes (indifference), resonance (loyalty).

We have all been in that strategy meeting. The dashboard is green. Uptime is 99.9%, support ticket volume is down, roadmap is on schedule. And yet, customers are churning. The problem isn't the data. It's the definition. We treat "customer satisfaction" as a single bucket. We dump everything into it: bug fixes, new features, polite support emails, brand colors. If the bucket is full, we assume we are winning. But satisfaction isn't a bucket. It's...
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Dead Time Is Story Time

3 min read

Waiting isn't friction to eliminate. It's captive attention begging for engagement. The best products turn loading screens into learning moments.

I stumbled on David Maister's 1985 research on waiting psychology while thinking about loading screens. His foundational principle: occupied time feels shorter than unoccupied time. But he uncovered something deeper. Anxiety, uncertainty, and unexplained delays make waits feel exponentially longer. That got me thinking. Most product teams treat waiting as friction to eliminate. Load faster. Reduce checkout steps. Skip the queue. But you can't eliminate all dead time. Users will wait during loading, onboarding, checkout,...
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Context Engineering Turns AI Agents From Goldfish Into Assistants

7 min read

Google's whitepaper shows why stateful AI requires engineering context with Sessions and Memory, not just better prompts.

Your AI agent is brilliant. It can write code, analyze documents, and answer complex questions with remarkable sophistication. It is also a goldfish. Every conversation starts from scratch. Every user is a stranger. Every context is new. Google just released a whitepaper on context engineering that tackles this fundamental problem. The paper introduces a systematic framework for making LLM agents stateful using two core primitives: Sessions and Memory. The framework formalizes the architectural patterns that...
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How to Build Product Sense

3 min read

Product sense isn't magic—it's systematic practice. Learn how to build intuition through decision-making, user empathy, and pattern recognition.

Everyone agrees product sense separates good PMs from great ones. Nobody can define what it actually means. Here's the paradox: product sense feels like intuition, but it's built through systematic practice. It looks like magic, but it's earned through reflection, pattern recognition, and user empathy. The vagueness isn't because it's mystical—it's because it's contextual. What works in enterprise software fails in consumer apps. What matters in healthcare differs from fintech. But certain principles hold. Here's...
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The Impact Scorecard

3 min read

A simple framework to evaluate product impact: map your work by customer value and business value to focus on what matters most.

It's surprisingly easy to stay busy without making much of an impact. A team ships features, hits sprint goals, and sees metrics move—but six months later, it's unclear what actually mattered. Not because the team wasn't working hard, but because "impact" is slippery to define. I've found it helpful to think about impact along two dimensions: customer value and business value. When you map your work on both axes, patterns start to emerge about what's...
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The Strategy-Outcome Connection: Moving Beyond the Feature Roadmap

7 min read

How product managers can move beyond feature roadmaps to build strategy-driven outcomes, handle stakeholder pressure, and make sharper prioritization decisions.

The loudest voice problem If you’ve ever owned a roadmap, you’ve likely faced this. A senior leader walks into your review and says, “We need to build this feature next quarter.” The statement carries weight. It comes from experience, hierarchy, and often, conviction. You might even agree at first. Maybe you think, “Let’s build it once to gain trust.” Sometimes that’s a fair trade. But most times, that’s how the loudest voice in the room...
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Platform Products Need to Earn Their Keep

8 min read

Platform products need empathy and accountability. Treat them like external products — measure impact, earn trust, and prove real value.

Every company wants to build platforms. Few succeed. The promise sounds irresistible: build it once, reuse it across teams, and move faster forever. But inside most enterprises, “platform” has become a buzzword attached to sprawling systems that no one loves and everyone tolerates. Some of these platforms thrive because they are built with empathy and clarity. Others limp along as corporate mandates — used begrudgingly, updated reluctantly, and funded indefinitely. I’ve seen both ends of...
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Adaptability, Creativity, Tech Fluency: The Skills Defining Work Now

3 min read

The core skills once seen as future-ready—adaptability, creativity, and tech fluency—are already defining how work gets done today.

The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report offers a clear signal for product managers, technologists, and business leaders: the skills that matter most in the coming decade are not the same as those that powered the past. Well, the report is confirming what we are already seeing in full force: By 2030, success will hinge less on manual or routine capabilities and far more on adaptability, creativity, and fluency in technology. !Core Skills 2030...
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From Architect to Gardener to Orchestrator in the AI Era

4 min read

How AI transforms product leadership from building to conducting. The rise of the Orchestrator mindset in product management.

Last year, I wrote about two product management mindsets: the Architect who blueprints everything upfront, and the Gardener who plants seeds and discovers what grows. That framework made sense when humans did all the work. Not anymore (or not very soon). AI is changing the game. It can architect better than architects (generating requirements, writing specs, and creating test cases). It can garden better than gardeners (running thousands of experiments, adapting in real-time, finding patterns...
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When to Trust Intuition vs. Metrics

3 min read

Intuition is a compass, metrics are a map. Here’s how product managers can decide which to trust, depending on the product stage.

This is a follow-up from an earlier post on the limit of metrics. Product managers often wrestle with a familiar question: Should I trust the numbers, or should I trust my instincts? The truth is, both matter — but their weight changes depending on where your product is in its lifecycle. Intuition plays a bigger role early, while metrics take over later. Knowing when to lean on which can be the difference between chasing noise...
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Observability Now Includes Watching AI

2 min read

AI observability means monitoring accuracy, drift, and hallucinations, not just uptime. PMs must treat it as a core product feature.

When product managers think of observability, they usually mean uptime, latency, or error rates. But as AI becomes central to user experiences, that definition must expand. Observability now includes monitoring model accuracy, hallucinations, prompt injection, and real-time behavior. As Datadog’s CPO Yanbing Li notes, AI systems add a new layer of complexity to enterprise monitoring. Why AI demands a new observability lens Traditional software is deterministic. If a server or a function fails, you can...
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The Informal Committees Behind B2B Buying

3 min read

B2B buying isn’t decided by end users alone. Informal committees shape decisions, and product managers must map their jobs-to-be-done.

When we think about product adoption, the focus usually falls on the end user. Product managers map user needs with frameworks like jobs-to-be-done (JTBD), ensuring the product fits a real workflow. But in B2B, adoption doesn't always equal purchase. Deals often hinge on an informal buying committee — a shifting group of individuals who influence or approve decisions, even if they never use the product directly. This isn’t a boardroom-style committee. It’s a loose network...
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Modernizing the Product Requirements Process

4 min read

PRDs aren’t dead—they’re evolving. Learn how to modernize product requirements with outcome focus, living documents, and AI-powered prototyping.

Few artifacts in product management are as debated as the Product Requirements Document (PRD). Once a cornerstone of software development, the PRD has been dismissed by many as a relic of the waterfall era. Agile evangelists often claimed that documentation slowed teams down, stifled creativity, and created rigid contracts rather than flexible collaboration. Yet the pendulum has swung too far. In many organizations, the absence of structured requirements has led to chaos: misaligned expectations, duplicated...
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How to Make OKRs Work

3 min read

Practical tips to make OKRs work: writing strong objectives, measurable key results, and avoiding common pitfalls in execution.

This is Part 2 of a two-part series on OKRs inspired by John Doerr’s book Measuring What Matters. You can read Part 1 here: Why OKRs Matter. OKRs are simple to understand, but deceptively hard to get right. Many teams write OKRs once, post them in a slide deck, and never look back. Others confuse them with KPIs or use them as a laundry list of tasks. The result is disappointment: OKRs become busywork rather...
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Cultivating True Agile: From Process to Outcome

5 min read

Agile is not stand-ups or sprints. Learn how to cultivate true agility by focusing on outcomes, empowering teams, and decentralizing decisions.

Few words in technology are as overused—and misunderstood—as Agile. Too often, teams say they are Agile because they run sprints, hold stand-ups, or use Jira boards. But rituals without outcomes are just theater. True agility is not about process compliance. It is about creating organizations that learn quickly, adapt continuously, and deliver meaningful results. Agile Theater vs. True Agility The Agile Manifesto was written to emphasize people, collaboration, and adaptability. Yet many organizations reduce it...
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Why OKRs Matter

3 min read

Learn why OKRs matter, how they align teams, and the four superpowers that make them a proven framework for execution.

This is Part 1 of a two-part series on OKRs inspired by John Doerr’s book Measuring What Matters. In Part 2, we’ll explore how to make OKRs work in practice. Most organizations don’t fail because of a lack of effort. They fail because energy is scattered across too many priorities. Objectives and Key Results, or OKRs, provide a way to channel focus toward what truly matters. An OKR has two parts: Objective: a clear, inspiring...
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Jobs-to-be-Done - Demand Reducers and Systems Thinking

5 min read

Explore the demand reducers in Jobs-to-be-Done—Inertia and Anxiety—and how systems thinking helps overcome hidden barriers to product adoption.

In Part 1, we explored the forces that generate demand: the push of dissatisfaction with the status quo and the pull of a better future. Together, they explain why customers look for change and what attracts them to a solution. But even when push and pull are strong, adoption isn’t guaranteed. Hidden forces often prevent products from being hired. These are the demand reducers: Inertia and Anxiety. As Alan Klement describes, these forces are as...
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Jobs-to-be-Done and the Forces that Create Product Demand

5 min read

Learn how Jobs-to-be-Done explains the forces that create product demand—Push and Pull—and why progress, not features, drives adoption.

We hear a lot about being “customer-centric.” It’s on slides, in strategy decks, and peppered into pitches. But too often it’s a buzzword. The real test is this: do we truly understand why customers choose our products—or why they don’t? The Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) framework, shaped by thinkers like Alan Klement, offers a clearer lens. Customers don’t buy products because of features alone. They “hire” them to make progress in their lives. That progress is the...
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