Product Thinking

Balance is an active process. We can’t wait until we’re older to play outside, because it will be too late then. We need the sun while we’re growing up. We can’t wait until mid-terms are over because there will always be some sort of mid-term in our life. We need to find balance each day and each phase of our life.

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Weekly newsletter: Finding Whole-Life Balance: Avoiding Myopia and Burnout, and Actively Finding Balance
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Life is incredibly hard. We can only choose to live well within the constraints we have. Which is what the book Life is Hard by Kieran Setiya explores. Often it will be less than the ideal that many would envision. But as we shift our mindset away from the idea of ourselves as failures, as projects that need completion, as people who need to be perfect, we can progress, empathize with each other, and create meaningful lives.

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Weekly newsletter: Life is Hard: Book Review
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Another month, another host of great articles, listens, books and other finds from Product Thinking and around the internet. Here’s what you may have missed.

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Weekly newsletter: Product Roadmaps, Mechanical Watches, and the Science of Fun
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The creation process is always messy. We can’t avoid it. As we work to dig and uncover the right things to do, those of us doing the work are often down in the hole shoveling mud. But that is how we eventually get to the right thing.

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Weekly newsletter: The Messiness of Doing The Work: What Some Managers Don't Understand
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A roadmap won’t fix everything (and is often the source of its own problems), but having a product vision and strategy that you can communicate, prioritize against, and ultimately deliver on through your roadmap, will make you a much better product manager and a better product organization.

So how can we create good product roadmaps? Listen in for that and more.

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Weekly newsletter: Product Roadmaps: What Are They Good For
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This month we’re reviewing the book Zone to Win by Geoffrey Moore. Last month we reviewed the book Crossing the Chasm by the same author. It offers good insight into the need for separating zones in an organization. Using the three horizons framework, it makes sense to allow different types of innovations to operate differently.

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Weekly newsletter: Zone to Win: Book Review
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Twitter: @kylelarryevans and @producthinking and @prod_by_design
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Another month, another host of great articles, listens, books and other finds from Product Thinking and around the internet. Here’s what you may have missed.

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Weekly newsletter: Airplane Seat Switching and The Endowment Effect
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Loss aversion, or the endowment effect, is a cognitive bias that describes why, for individuals, the pain of losing is psychologically twice as powerful as the pleasure of gaining. Once you recognize the endowment effect or loss aversion, you will begin to see it more frequently. From switching airplane seats to company changes.

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Weekly newsletter: Airplane Seat Switching and The Endowment Effect
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Working on the right thing is one of the most important aspects of product development. It is one of the key roles of product management. So understanding the right framework for getting our priorities correct is critical for all product managers and product teams. We can’t overlook the broader strategic prioritization framework while we’re considering how to prioritize within our products. So don’t miss the forest for the trees, or the strategy for the backlog.

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Weekly newsletter: Product Prioritization: A Strategic Framework for Building the Right Thing
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Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore is a classic for good reason. The principles are as relevant today as they were 20 years ago. And while the companies continually change, the need to understand that our marketing, sales, and product development need to adapt in order to meet the needs of the right group of customers at the right time will always be constant. 

It’s easy to get lost in our current customers, especially for early technology products. But by keeping the chasm in mind, and understanding we need to adapt our products (and companies) to cross the chasm and reach the mainstream, we can avoid becoming another body in the void. 

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Weekly newsletter: Crossing the Chasm: Book Review
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