Inspiring Strong Product Leaders: A Conversation with Petra Wille

I first met Petra Wille, a fellow product coach, at Mind the Product and was immediately impressed with her work. While I tend to focus on helping teams, Petra’s work centers around helping product leaders—the people who manage product managers. The people in these roles don’t always come from a product background, so they may need guidance to understand...

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Product in Practice: Iterating to an Actionable Outcome at tails.com

Hello Product Talk readers, we’re excited to share the latest Product in Practice with you! For this story, we caught up with Sonja Martin, Product Manager at tails.com. Sonja shares how her cross-functional team has changed their approach to defining their desired outcome over time. Want to check out the other posts in this series? You can find them...

Aug 2020

Opportunity Mapping: An Essential Skill for Driving Product Outcomes

The following is an excerpt from my upcoming book, Continuous Discovery Habits. It’s the opening to my chapter on Opportunity Mapping. Read to the end for an exciting new announcement. “To maintain the state of doubt and to carry on systematic and protracted inquiry—these are the essentials of thinking.” John Dewey, How We Think “Structure is complicated....

Jul 2020

Doing Discovery Well: How to Measure and Guide Your Team

How do you know that you are doing discovery well? If you want to improve your discovery process, what outcomes help you track your progress? I get asked these questions often. I like that teams are trying to take an outcome-focused mindset to their discovery practice. The good news is setting discovery outcomes is no different from setting any other...

Jun 2020

Empower Product Teams with Product Outcomes, Not Business Outcomes

I’m excited to add Hope Gurion as an official author on Product Talk. She has guest posted here before and has worked with me for years. She coaches teams using my Continuous Discovery Habits curriculum and is helping me bring the Continuous Discovery Habits workshop to more companies. Help me in welcoming Hope as an official author. You’ll see she’s...

May 2020

Product in Practice: How 2-Way Door Decisions Helped Simply Business Learn Fast

Welcome to the latest installment of Product in Practice! For this post, we spoke with a product team from Simply Business about some of the major lessons they’ve learned since adopting continuous discovery habits like interviewing their customers, questioning their assumptions, and using the opportunity solution tree to guide their work. Want to check...

Apr 2020

Working Remotely? 5 Ways to Help Your Product Team Thrive

Product teams should be co-located. This is an often-repeated “truth” in our industry. Today, in response to COVID-19, many companies are instituting mandatory work-from-home policies. This is making co-location impossible for many teams. Thankfully, this “truth” was already on its way to being retired. In fact, it was never true for many companies....

Mar 2020

Why Product Trios Should Interview Customers Together

The following is an excerpt from my upcoming book, Continuous Discovery Habits. I’d love your feedback in the comments. After reading, are you ready to interview as a trio? Still have doubts? Please let me know your thoughts. Product research needs to be timely, actionable, and believable for a product team to act upon it. Product research needs to...

Mar 2020

Product in Practice: Tackling Big Hairy Product Challenges with Continuous Discovery

Hello, Product Talk readers! It’s time for another installment of Product in Practice. In this series, we highlight the impressive work that forward-thinking product teams are doing. Want to check out the other people and companies we’ve featured? Find our other Product in Practice posts here. Ask 100 product managers how they ended up in their roles...

Feb 2020

What I’m Saying Yes to in 2020 (With 2 Big Announcements)

For many of us, the beginning of the year is a fresh start. It’s an opportunity to recommit to the things that matter most to us. Last year, I wrote “What I’m Saying No to This Year—And Why” to clearly outline what I wanted to focus on in 2019. Over the course of the year, I reread that post at least a dozen times to help me stay focused on my priorities....

Jan 2020