Choosing What I Keep
From flashcards to forgetting everything—how I built Etch to help ideas actually stick instead of fade away.
Subtract to Ship
The way a product team moves quickly, delivers value, and achieves perfection.
Avoiding Technical Debt
The Strategic Importance of Domain Fidelity in Software Development
Removing Product Friction Isn't Always Good
Removing too much friction can hurt user safety, impact other features, or cause system failures. Balance friction reduction with your product goals.
Customer Interview Frameworks
Six proven frameworks—Voice of Customer, Jobs to be Done, Follow Me Home, Focus Groups, SPIN, and Four Helpful Lists—for conducting effective customer interviews.
Competitors Who Aren't
Companies with the same problem space but different market spaces will eventually compete as they grow. Plan for future overlap now or risk becoming the next Blackberry.
The Product Imperative
Product managers fall prey to six default behaviors that kill innovation. Organize your work to actively resist these traps.
OpenAI's GPT-3 Will Change How We Build, With or Without It
GPT-3 shows us how creating better primers—the right medium, direction, and quality—helps product managers generate novel and valuable solutions.
Part 2 - Building a Product Sieve
Build a product sieve using problem statements, vision, and sieve questions to separate high-quality ideas from low-quality ones.
Collaborative Writing as a Product Manager
Write in public from day one to generate better ideas, let people read your mind, and build team ownership of product decisions.
Part 1 - Building a Product Sieve
Stop working on valueless features by creating a product sieve that filters high-value ideas from motion without results.
The Map Is Not the Territory
Great product managers understand that mental models and abstractions are useful but imperfect representations of reality. Build better maps of your domain.
Problem Space vs Solution Space
Product managers own the "what" by living in problem space—understanding target customers, their needs, and value proposition—while engineering focuses on the "how."
Leverage
Stop doing low-leverage tasks and start working on things that provide 80% of value for 20% of work by casting vision and setting clear expectations.
The Bike Shed Effect
Teams waste time debating trivial issues while ignoring complex, important decisions. Force people to write and think deeply to solve this.
Inversion <> uoᴉsɹǝʌuI
Use inversion thinking to ensure your team works on high-impact features by defining what success looks like and what will guarantee failure.