RAFFIAPALM

Resources for product teams from industry experts

Excerpts

  • You don’t need all of the world on day one, and let’s take that one step further—you positively don’t want the attention of the whole world, because that means you’ve made something for everyone, not something that’s going to be loved by the people you want to matter to first. When we stop saying, ‘Look at the incredible wings we’ve made for you’ and begin with, ‘Can you see how amazing your wings are in this light?’ it changes everything. The trap we fall into is trying to tell people how life-changing our widget is. If it changes their lives, we won’t have to tell them.

    — Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly by Bernadette Jiwa

    Source: Amazon Kindle
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  • Good teams have product, design, and engineering sit side by side, and they embrace the give and take between the functionality, the user experience, and the enabling technology.

    Good teams get their inspiration and product ideas from their vision and objectives, from observing customers’ struggle, from analyzing the data customers generate from using their product, and from constantly seeking to apply new technology to solve real problems.

    Good teams understand who each of their key stakeholders are, they understand the constraints that these stakeholders operate in, and they are committed to inventing solutions that work not just for users and customers, but also work within the constraints of the business.

    Good teams are skilled in the many techniques to rapidly try out product ideas to determine which ones are truly worth building.

    Good teams love to have brainstorming discussions with smart thought leaders from across the company.

    Good teams are constantly trying out new ideas to innovate, but doing so in ways that protect the revenue and protect the brand.

    Good teams insist they have the skill sets on their team, such as strong product design, necessary to create winning products.

    Good teams ensure that their engineers have time to try out the prototypes in discovery every day so that they can contribute their thoughts on how to make the product better.

    Good teams engage directly with end users and customers every week, to better understand their customers, and to see the customer’s response to their latest ideas.

    Good teams know that many of their favorite ideas won’t end up working for customers, and even the ones that could will need several iterations to get to the point where they provide the desired outcome.

    Good teams understand the need for speed and how rapid iteration is the key to innovation, and they understand this speed comes from the right techniques and not forced labor.

    Good teams make high‐integrity commitments after they’ve evaluated the request and ensured they have a viable solution that will work for the customer and the business.

    Good teams instrument their work so they can immediately understand how their product is being used and make adjustments based on the data.

    Good teams integrate and release continuously, knowing that a constant stream of smaller releases provides a much more stable solution for their customers.

    Good teams obsess over their reference customers.

    Good teams celebrate when they achieve a significant impact to the business results.

    — INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love by Marty Cagan

    Source: Amazon Kindle
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  • Very rarely does something happen with no chain of events to follow. It’s your job to look past the positive reinforcement and gratification you may receive, which frankly may be blinding you, and understand what could go wrong, how wrong it could go, and why it might go wrong. What if you viewed each decision as having the potential to topple other dominoes and set about identifying them? Tedious yet informative. Second-order thinking allows you to project the totality of your decisions. Even if you don’t change your decision because of what you determine through second-order thinking, you think through ten times as many scenarios and thus make far more informed choices than you would otherwise. Sometimes, that’s the best we can do as a person. We can’t predict the future, but we can’t not think about it.

    — Mental Models: 30 Thinking Tools that Separate the Average From the Exceptional. Improved Decision-Making, Logical Analysis, and Problem-Solving by Peter Hollins

    Source: Amazon Kindle
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  • This is the true promise of the Startup Way: a management system that contains within it the seeds of its own evolution by providing an opportunity for every employee to become an entrepreneur. In doing so, it creates opportunities for leadership and keeps the people best suited for leadership in the company, reduces the waste of both time and energy and creates a system for solving challenges with speed and flexibility, all of which lead to better financial outcomes. But the most important use of the Startup Way isn’t to create better and more profitable companies. It’s to serve as a system for building a more inclusive and innovative society.

    — The Startup Way: How Modern Companies Use Entrepreneurial Management to Transform Culture and Drive Long-Term Growth by Eric Ries

    Source: Amazon Kindle
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  • Continuous transformation—an organization’s capability to test and learn from experiments having to do with its own structure and processes, promoting the best-proven techniques company-wide while limiting or discarding the rest—is what will give that organization the ability to thrive in the modern era. It’s my last suggestion as an addition to the toolbox of the entrepreneurial management function.

    Let’s formalize and systematize that approach so that we build up a critical mass of like-minded entrepreneurs who can tackle the full heterogeneous range of challenges we’re likely to face in the twenty-first century and beyond.

    — The Startup Way: How Modern Companies Use Entrepreneurial Management to Transform Culture and Drive Long-Term Growth by Eric Ries

    Source: Amazon Kindle
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