October 2022

Product Sense Demystified - Silicon Valley Product Group

Even though I have been writing consistently about product now for more than two decades, including a few books, I have thus far managed to avoid using the term “product sense.”  That was not an accident.  I have always disliked the term, and I especially dislike the implications. But for whatever reason, a lot more...

High-Integrity Commitments - Silicon Valley Product Group

The past several articles have discussed the nature of Continuous Discovery.  In this article I’d like to discuss another dimension of working effectively in an Agile environment, which is how we manage commitments. In most Agile teams, when you mention commitments (like knowing what you’re going to launch and when it will happen), you get...

Lead with Context not Control - Silicon Valley Product Group

There are so many good books available today that try to explain to company leaders the advantages of empowering your people. Some of my current favorites include: Leaders Eat Last, Startup Nation, The Art of Action, Turn the Ship Around, Extreme Ownership, Team of Teams, and Leadership is Language.  I consider each of these inspiring...

September 2022

Pledge To Customers - Silicon Valley Product Group

An Empowered Product Team’s Pledge To Customers As a company moves from sales-driven feature teams to empowered product teams, there are some fairly significant changes to how the product teams need to interact with customers. Most of those changes are not directly visible to the customers, as they involve how product teams do their daily...

August 2022

Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri

Like most of us, when Melissa Perri started as a product manager she started with giant requirements documents, dutifully recording every little detail from stakeholders and turning them into shiny docs for the developers. Then she discovered Agile and churned out features even faster. But eventually she realised that she had been building features for [...] Read more »