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These are insights about Product Management from my 25+ years of experience.
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Product Leaders
Product Discovery Fundamentals
Solution Tests, Recruiting & Interviewing
Data & Analytics for Product Organizations
Business of Consulting
Top Product Books & Thinkers
Recent Posts
Annual Operating Planning (AOP): A Practical Approach for Product Leaders
It’s the time of year where leaders in all organizations are planning for next year, creating an Annual Operation Plan (AOP).
While these plans may not always unfold exactly as envisioned, they create a shared understanding among leaders and teams about key priorities for the coming year.
I recently facilitated a roundtable with several leaders about annual planning and distilled the discussion into an approach that is less painful and more fruitful.
Case Study: The Hidden Limits of Optimization
During my time in ecommerce, my team made some key adjustments leading up to the Christmas season with the goal of boosting conversion rates. We ran a multivariate test, tweaking elements in 7 critical areas on our most visited page type. Each area experimented with multiple variations, allowing us to test a wide range of possibilities.
Case Study: Are your renewals a house of cards?
After a reorg, my team inherited what we thought was an awesome product.
We had big name clients and a flashy demo that opened door after door for new prospective clients.
However, as we talked to current clients and looked into their use of the product (or lack thereof), it was clear this product was struggling.
Articles Archive
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2020
- Mar 27, 2020 PM/UX Thought Leader — Michael Sippey
- Mar 29, 2020 User Experience Mapping — How to Get on the Same Page Quickly
- Mar 29, 2020 Overcome Common Barriers to User Testing
- Mar 29, 2020 Book Review: Sprint
- Mar 29, 2020 Yes, You Can Meet 100 Customers Per Year
- Mar 29, 2020 Book Review: Inspired
- Mar 31, 2020 Product Discovery - User Experience Mapping with Office 365
- Apr 8, 2020 Product Discovery - Collaborative Prototype Building with Figma
- Apr 16, 2020 Make Sure to Communicate in Multiple Ways
- Apr 17, 2020 Communicating Clearly When Working From Home
- Apr 21, 2020 Organize Your Product Team using Airtable
- Apr 21, 2020 Creating User Empathy Within Your Company using FullStory
- Apr 21, 2020 Take the Time to do Deeper User Research
- Apr 22, 2020 Identifying and Recruiting Power Users on Your Site with FullStory
- Apr 22, 2020 Zero Budget User Recruiting and Interviewing
- Apr 22, 2020 Getting Remote Users Relaxed and Ready for Interviews
- Apr 22, 2020 Partnering with Customer Success to Recruit Customers for User Testing
- Apr 22, 2020 Top Websites for Fast User Recruiting
- Apr 23, 2020 Easily Pivot to Remote User Testing
- Apr 24, 2020 How to Handle Customer Feature Requests
- Apr 28, 2020 Example: Product Discovery Meetings Calendar
- Apr 28, 2020 Remote Product Discovery Toolkit
- Jul 17, 2020 How do Product Managers end up being overworked?
- Jul 23, 2020 Have Product Leaders Cut Designers Out of the Design Process?
- Aug 20, 2020 Why Success is a Bad Thing for Product Leaders
- Aug 28, 2020 Stop “protecting” your engineer’s time
- Sep 8, 2020 Improve Conversion by Using a Consumer Decision Tree
- Sep 9, 2020 Be lazy and smart. Find and automate your leading indicators.
- Sep 9, 2020 Make data-driven decisions by turning your vision into a math equation
- Oct 8, 2020 Use “more” Engineer Time Sooner to Reduce Total Engineering Time
- Oct 8, 2020 Example: Product Discovery Workflow
- Oct 16, 2020 Example: Core Product Discovery Team
- Dec 15, 2020 4 Components of a Product Discovery Experiment
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2021
- May 21, 2021 Video: Product Discovery - An approach you'll actually use
- Dec 2, 2021 A Leaner Startup: Learn, Build, Measure
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2022
- Jan 15, 2022 Now What? Making Decisions After Testing Solutions with Users
- Jan 17, 2022 How to Determine a Winner in Solution Test Interviews
- Jan 19, 2022 How to Speed Up Analysis of Solution Test Interviews
- Jan 23, 2022 When to be Proactive in a Solution Test Interview
- Jan 27, 2022 What to Watch for in a Solution Test Interview
- Jan 31, 2022 What to Listen for in a Solution Test Interview
- Feb 4, 2022 How to Kickoff a Successful Solution Test Interview
- Feb 6, 2022 Don’t Say These Things During User Interviews
- Feb 8, 2022 How to Plan a Successful Solution Test Interview
- Feb 12, 2022 How to Recruit Users for a Successful Solution Test Interview
- Feb 16, 2022 Design to Learn. Beware the Completionist Approach.
- Feb 20, 2022 The Product Discovery Valley of Death
- Feb 24, 2022 The Solution Test Interview Explained
- May 2, 2022 Book Review: LOVED
- Aug 17, 2022 Book Review: Good Strategy Bad Strategy
- Dec 29, 2022 Redefining Product Development
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2023
- Jan 12, 2023 What is Success in Product
- Apr 20, 2023 Book Review: The Right It - Why So Many Ideas Fail and How to Make Sure Yours Succeed
- May 22, 2023 An Unsettling Trend: The Analytics-Free Environment
- May 25, 2023 Analytics Transformation: How Leaders Can Avoid the Analytics-Free Environment
- May 25, 2023 A Note on Analytics Design
- May 25, 2023 Making it Easy to Access Data
- May 25, 2023 Case Study: Creating team-level success metrics
- May 25, 2023 How Leaders Can Motivate Teams to Analyze Data
- Oct 9, 2023 Book Review: The Mom Test
- Oct 24, 2023 Facilitation Skills: Avoid Groupthink and One-Sided Discussions
- Nov 7, 2023 Product Ops: Managing Data Analysts
- Nov 8, 2023 Product Leaders: Getting Teams Started with Product Discovery
- Dec 13, 2023 I Don’t Have Time for Product Discovery
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2024
- Mar 22, 2024 How do you know you're successful today?
- Apr 4, 2024 Our Half-Baked Adoption of OKRs
- Apr 13, 2024 The Consultant Technology Stack
- Apr 13, 2024 Use the “Expenses Grinder” to Trim Costs
- May 23, 2024 How to gain executive backing for design and research activities
- Aug 18, 2024 Layers of Product Discovery
- Sep 17, 2024 The 13th month: Product Management's impact on renewals
- Sep 26, 2024 Case Study: Are your renewals a house of cards?
- Oct 10, 2024 Case Study: The Hidden Limits of Optimization
- Oct 10, 2024 When Am I Done Solving a Problem?
- Oct 30, 2024 Learning From the “Outside In”
- Nov 6, 2024 Annual Operating Planning (AOP): A Practical Approach for Product Leaders
Has your Product team created a “pixel perfect” design before even talking to users?
Does the initial design have more than 10 screens?
If so, the designs are overbuilt and too big to learn from.