Resources for product teams from industry experts
To be creative, to create something that doesn’t already exist in the mind, is becoming more and more difficult. If not impossible. The basic approach of positioning is not to create something new and different but to manipulate what’s already up there in the mind, to retie the connections that already exist.
— Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries, Jack Trout
In epidemics, the messenger matters: messengers are what make something spread. But the content of the message matters too. And the specific quality that a message needs to be successful is the quality of “stickiness.” Is the message—or the food, or the movie, or the product—memorable? Is it so memorable, in fact, that it can create change, that it can spur someone to action?
— The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
Change for the better is not just possible, but absolutely necessary. A good leader cannot sit and watch things carry on as usual without sorting out how transformation can occur. In all of my years in this industry, across companies large and small, I have never seen a team that doesn’t need to change and evolve over time.
— Engineering Management for the Rest of Us by Sarah Drasner
The cycle of conflict, mystery, and resolution is as old as storytelling itself, and at the heart of every good tale is variability. The unknown is fascinating and strong stories hold our attention by waiting to reveal what happens next. In a phenomenon called “experience-taking,” researchers have shown that people who read a story about a character actually feel what the protagonist is feeling. As we step into the character’s shoes we experience his or her motivations — including the search for rewards of the tribe, hunt, and self.
— Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal
I bet you’ve heard the saying “You can’t see the forest for the trees.” This saying stays true in the so-called “forest thinking” as well. When we analyze the intensive boundaries of a problem, considering every single aspect—or tree—of it, we can lose our focus on what matters. Instead of trying to narrow down if a particular dishwasher stopped working on Sunday afternoon, it’s more useful to see how often the dishwasher breaks down in general, how big the load is when it breaks down compared to the load when it works well, and so on. Forest thinking shows us the “on average” state of a system. To improve your forest thinking skills, try to discover similarities rather than differences—especially when in an organizational setting.
Just because every person has their own strengths, doesn’t mean that they don’t share some attributives—being useful for the company for instance. One person can be terrible at maintaining good relationships with customers but can be exceptionally good at critical thinking. Instead of looking at individual factors, take a look at some central questions like “What is the interaction between the aspects guiding someone’s work morale?”
— The Systems Thinker – Mental Models: Take Control Over Your Thought Patterns. Learn Advanced Decision-Making and Problem-Solving Skills by Albert Rutherford
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