Ant Murphy
@ant_murphy
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Product Coach & Founder of @ProductPathways - Helping product people have greater impact and companies shift to the product model 🚀
Sydney, New South Wales
Joined April 2019
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Pinned Tweet
🚨NEW Product Strategy Workshop Board🚨
Many Product Manager's I work with don't know where to start when it comes to building a Product Strategy.
You may have seen Product Strategy Templates like...
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OKRs are widespread but often implemented wrong.
Here's 5 first principles when implementing OKRs:
👇
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1K
Most Product Managers are terrible story tellers because they don't have any scaffolding.
We all have great stories on our product already.
We just need a way to firm it up.
Here is a structure I use regularly.
I call it "Building a narrative top-down, bottom-up"
/1 🧵
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OKRs vs KPIs
Really the difference is often how you want to define them because really they’re just labels.
But how I like to use them are:
KPIs = baseline health
OKRs = things we want to change
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Don't scale agile.
Descale the work and organisation instead.
One of the best books on building an agile organisation is not what you'd expect.
But 'Team of Teams' is a bible for building a resilient and adaptive organisation.
Here's serveral enablers from the book 👇
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Hers's a hack I use when Stakeholders come with solutions, NOT problems.
Don't work backwards, work forward.
What do I mean by that?
Commonly when a stakeholder comes w/ a solution we try to get them to work backwards to the problem.
But for some this is a stretch.
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Sick of Jira?
Struggling to manage your Product Backlog?
Lost in the vastness of your backlog?
Here are 8️⃣different ways to organize your Product Backlog 🧵👇
(including templates)
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Product Discovery is allusive and tricky to put down on paper because the activities you do is largely driven by what kind of risk you have.
Which is why Assumptions Mapping is such a great tool. You need to determine what risk you have and test them.
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@lindsaycrouse
Check out the book the ‘the 100 year life’ and the concept of a multi-stage life.
This is become more important than ever as we continue to live longer and healthier.
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Roadmaps are NOT Plans ❌
Roadmaps are NOT Plans ❌
Roadmaps are NOT Plans ❌
One of the top drivers I find for putting dates on roadmaps is trying to treat them like plans.
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Great Product Managers don't say ‘no’ a lot.
Instead, they provide clarity and context so stakeholders can say ‘no’ to themselves.
🧵👇
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One key activity I get PMs to do when I coach them on their First 90 Days is to create a learning backlog.
To help guide this I often draw this matrix:
Essentially there's 4 categories of things you need to know:
- PM Craft
- Your Product
- Market
- Business
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One of the best exec teams I've worked with spent a full day together every week. That's 20% of their time together.
If you blocked out a full day every 2 weeks, that's only 10%.
I know teams that struggle to get 30 mins together a week...& they wonder why they're not aligned.
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High WIP (work-in-progress) is one of the worse viruses for you business can have.
It's damaging on two fronts:
1) It hurts your customers = lower quality, poor outcomes, slow work, etc...
2) It hurts your people = stress, overwork, disengagement, etc…
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*UPDATED* Product Discovery activities by risk.
Product Discovery is elusive and tricky to put down on paper because the activities you do is largely driven by what kind of risk you have.\
/1
🧵👇
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Putting a 2 day Product Management training together for a client.
Outline done 💥
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Product Discovery activities by risk.
This isn't supposed to be an 'ultimate list' or 'must do'
I created it as a guide to help give you an idea of some of the discovery activities that you might do depending on what you need to test - you still need to work out what to test!
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Product Management is:
Define where are we going (vision) > How we choose to get there (strategy) > Slice Outcomes > Discover customer problems (discovery) > Build-Measure-Learn (delivery) > Pivot bases on results
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For iterative development I'm a big fan of writing your backlog items as hypotheses over the traditional user story narrative.
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“If you try to please everyone, you please no one.”
This is why 'niching down' is such a huge unlock for startups and new products.
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A feature is not 'DONE' until it's had impact!
Too many orgs ship a new feature and immediately move on to the next shinny object.
And seldomly cycle back to anything they've shipped previously to measure the outcome.
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Here’s my guide to kick off Product Discovery (incl. tools/templates)
1) Define your Problem
2) Map your Assumptions
3) Prioritize your ‘Riskiest Assumptions’
4) Create a Discovery Backlog
5) Design your experiments
6) Bring it all together in a Research Plan
🧵👇
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Here are 8️⃣different Product Roadmap formats:
⏰ Timeline Roadmap (❌ best to avoid where possible)
🗺️ Now-Next-Later
🚀 Release Roadmap
🎭 Theme Roadmap
🌳 Tree Roadmap
🌟 Outcome Roadmap
❤️ Customer Journey Roadmap
💭 Dream Mapping (thanks
@squadformers
!)
👇🧵/1
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Most PMs I speak to don’t know how to do Discovery, so I thought I'd make my kick off approach available to everyone👇
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Learning how to be a Product Manager in large enterprises be like...
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My 5 most recommended books for anyone wanting to get into product:
- Build Trap by Melissa Perri
- Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres
- Testing Business Ideas by David J Bland
- User Story Mapping by Jeff Patton
- Inspired by Marty Cagan
What would you add?
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'Value' is ambiguous.
It's terrible advice to tell PMs to 'prioritise based on value'.
Instead we need to define value - define what value means for you.
And the answer is strategy. To define value we need to first define our strategy and turn them into measurable goals.
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4 major hallmarks of a 'Bad Strategy' from Richard Rumelt's book Good Strategy Bad Strategy:
- Fluff
- Failure to face the challenge
- Mistaking goals for strategy
- Bad strategic objectives
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Research suggest that generalists make great Product Managers 💪
For a long time I struggled with identifying as being a generalist.
I always thought it was a super power but society suggests otherwise.
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Product sense comes from building a deep understanding of:
-Human behavior (i.e. behavioral economics, biases, psychology, etc)
-Business acumen (i.e. business models, financials, operations, industry trends, etc)
cont...
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PMs DON'T need domain knowledge to be effective.
The mindset that product roles MUST know the domain is often a recipe for “I know what the customers want”
vs
Little/no domain knowledge acting as a forcing function to do proper discovery, to learn and uncover user needs.
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It might be time to ditch 'User Stories' and 'Epics'...
and move towards things like one-pagers, opportunities and hypotheses.
Why?
Because they’re better tools for facilitating outcome thinking and experimentation.
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"Here’s a hack I use to dealing with stakeholders coming with solutions, rather than problems.
Don’t try to work backwards, work forward."
Let me explain.
No doubt you’ve been in this situation before.
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I love how Jeff Patton always frames things.
He has a way of taking the complex and making it simple - like this 👇
Product Management summed up in a few simple words:
You want to help people
Find your thing,
Try it,
Use it,
Keep using it
and then say good things about it...
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“If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” right?
Well no.
A faster horse is just a solution.
What we really need to be asking is: What problem is a 'faster horse' solving?
🧵/1
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I love how Jeff Patton always frames things. He has a way of taking the complex and making it simple - like this 👇
Product Management summed up as:
You want to help people to
-Find your thing,
-Try it,
-Use it,
-Keep using it
-and say good things
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PM: "We can't do B now bc A is the priority..."
CTO: "So you're telling me we need to hire more ppl?"
PM: "No, I'm stating the priority...A is the focus atm."
CTO: "But I want B now...I'll hire ppl to do it."
No need to prioritize...just hire enough ppl to do everything 🙈
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High WIP (work-in-progress) is one of the worse viruses for you business can have.
It's damaging on two fronts:
1) It hurts your customers = lower quality, poor outcomes, slow work, etc...
2) It hurts your people = stress, overwork, disengagement, etc…
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OH: "If your strategy doesn’t help you say no to any items on your backlog it’s too broad...a strategy that doesn’t sharpen focus by eliminating work is not a strategy"
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You can't control whether people give you constructive feedback or not, but what you CAN control is how you respond.
One framework I’ve found helpful is the Feedback Staircase.
Regardless of how the feedback was delivered you want to move up these ‘steps’ not down them.
🧵/1
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"But it's too much for one person" is the common excuse I hear for having a PM + PO.
Instead, split the product vertically and introduce a second PM rather than a PO.
You're far better of splitting the work vertically, than horizontally.
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Story telling and linking your work back up to higher goals and strategy are key skills to influencing. Here's a framing I use regularly call "top-down, bottom-up"
⬇️ Top-down:
Starting with your product vision you can create a story all the way down.
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How to define your product 'niche' with the Niche Canvas 🎯
We’ve all heard the saying, “if you try to please everyone, you please no one”
This is especially true for startups and new products.
Which is why I developed the 'Niche Canvas' through my coaching for 0-1 products👇
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Did Apple just kill Trello for me?
The latest MacOS update now allows you to create columns in the native Reminders app 🤩 (which I already use heavily)... having a Kanban style layout was probably the only thing keeping me using Trello in parallel.
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Q: how do you approach the challenge of validating hypotheses without having a large / diverse user-base to draw from?
(Without knowing more about the context) here's what I've seen work in similar contexts:
1) Validate with 1-2 users who are your ideal target.
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PIVOT
SCALE
PERSEVERE
or KILL
A guide for scaling experiments and introducing new features.
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🚨 New template alert 🚨
Product Strategy One-Pager 🚀
I've been sitting on this template for a while now, used it with several clients to date and thought it was about time to make it available to everyone.
Download and more details here 👉
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Product Discovery is about reducing risk. We do this through research to gain confidence that we’re solving a meaningful problem is the best possible way.
Here's 3 core components of product discovery 👇
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Asking better questions in your 1:1s 👥
Here's a list of prompting questions I compiled for the Stakeholder Management Essentials course on
@ProductPathways
to help you have better conversations in your Stakeholder. 1:1s. I use these questions regularly.
What would you add?
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Companies often think company culture is having the occasional social event.
But it's:
- What you say & do
- What you reward
- What goes unsaid...what's ignored
- What is non-negotiable
- Widely accepted social norms
- What is celebrated
- Shared values
- The people
and more...
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I still maintain that learning psychology and particularly behavioural economics has been one of the highest leverage things I’ve done as a Product Manager.
Every problem is a human problem in product. It should be a no-brained to understand human behaviour.
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Hey
#prodmgmt
twitter,
What are some of your go-to questions for customer interviews?
I’ll go first:
“Can you show me how you're currently solving this?”
"Tell me about what you're using this for?"
“What else have you tried?”
"How have you tried to solve this in the past?"
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OH: I just spent an hour walking exec through one pagers and the CEO finished the session with “thanks but they’re all equal priority”
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Slice the outcome down small enough for the team to influence and then define the work to fit the outcome, NOT the other way around.
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Kick goals in your first First 90 Days by breaking it down into 3x30 day sprints:
Sprint 1 = Discovery
Sprint 2 = Early Wins
Sprint 3 = Establishing Trust
(Template included)
🧵/1
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5 Resume Mistakes I see Product Managers make and how to fix them👇
With all the recent layoffs I've been giving free resume advice when I can.
To scale this effort I wanted to share the most common mistakes I see and tips to make your cv standout.
I hope this helps!
/1 🧵
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Pre-Mortems are one of the most underused tools in your
#ProdMgmt
toolkit.
Unlike Post-Mortems which most are familiar with, rather than waiting until the end when everything has already gone wrong. A Pre-Mortem is done at the start of a project or item of work.
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Q: "What are 10 must do things in your first 90 days as a Senior Product Manager?"
1️⃣ build a learning backlog (what do you need to learn to be successful in your role and why? Use the matrix attached as a guide)
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I’m fortunate enough to have coached a lot of Product Managers and the biggest shifts I’ve observed PMs need to make to move into a Senior PM role are:
1️⃣ From 💡Solution + Problem to 🎯Strategy & Impact
2️⃣ Becoming adept in 🔶🔶 Discovery
3️⃣ Stop Making all the Decisions
🧵1/
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What to do in your First 30/60/90 Days as a Product Manager
How to approach your first 90 days as 3x 30 days sprints:
🔸Sprint 1 (first 30 days) = Discovery
🔸Sprint 2 (30–60 days) = Quick wins
🔸Sprint 3 (60–90 days) = Establishing trust
More 👇
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Here's 3 Product Vision formats that will turn your vision into a clear and punchy statement that people will actually remember.
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Roadmaps come in all shapes and sizes, none are prefect.
Here are 7 different roadmap formats:
⏳ Timeline Roadmap
🎯 Now-Next-Later Roadmap
🚀 Release Roadmap
📦 Theme Roadmap
🌴 Tree Roadmap
⭐ Outcome Roadmap
👩💻 Customer Journey Roadmap
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Deploy 📦 ≠ Release 🚀
Don't couple your deployments to your releases!
They're two different activities:
📦 Deploy when the work is done.
🚀 Release to the market strategically.
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The words we use matter
Beat the feature factory by choosing your words carefully…
Here’s my list:
Feature -> Opportunity
Project -> Bet
Plan -> Roadmap
Delivery Date -> Delivery Window
Targets -> Goals
Failure -> Learning
Requirements -> Discovery
...
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"I often find where places struggle with prioritization it’s not a “prioritization” problem per se, but rather a strategy one.
Either their product or organization strategy is vague or missing, or they're misaligned"
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This book blew my mind...nearly 60% of sales fall through due to indecision. This is despite the buyer having a clear desire to buy and making it through the entire sales process!
The most profound thing was why.
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Hey PMs, anyone NOT using Jira?
What do you use instead?
(Genuinely curious)
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I was recently introduced to the 'Laundromat Test'
If your strategy can be applied to a Laundromat, then it's probably not a good strategy.
Let me explain...
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Leaving your strategy up to chance or someone's gut-feel is not a ideal. Strategy should be insights driven.
Therefore the first step to building your product strategy is gathering inputs.
To help I like to break gathering inputs into 3 buckets:
- Market
- Business
- Product
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Your OKRs don’t live in a vacuum.
Yet this is exactly how I see many organizations treat them.
They jump on the bandwagon and create OKRs void of any context.
What I observe is this:
OKR -> Work
This is a problem because OKRs alone don't explain:
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Slice the outcome down small enough for the team to influence and then define the work to fit the outcome, NOT the other way around.
#ProductManagement
#Product
#Agile
#UX
#ProductOwner
#ProdMgmt
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I worked with a VP once who was talking about meetings and reporting, etc and what he said really stuck with me:
“Having a meeting with everyone is efficient for me…but my job isn’t to make MY life easier, it’s to make my TEAM’s life easier.”
Servant leadership in a nutshell👏
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Thank god! SAFe has added AI
Phew, I was worried for all those execs and their pet AI project for a minute there.
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❌ Don't lose your best people because you don't have a career path for them!
Not everyone wants to be a people manager, nor is everyone best suited to it.
This is also known as the 'Peter Principle':
/1
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'How I like to run Pre-Mortems' 👉
Pre-Mortems are among the most underused tools in a Product Manager’s and team’s toolkit.
Unlike Post-Mortems where we wait until the end. A Pre-Mortem is done at the start of an item of work to avoid risks/issues.
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7 ways to say NO as a Product Manager, without actually saying 'NO'
1) We're currently working on X, is this more or less important?
2) How does this fit with our current strategy?
3) Can you help me understand how this helps us achieve our current goal?
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"Most bets are made on conviction and values, not on analysis"
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The best kind of feedback:
"You Product discovery workshop that we went through the other week - I ran it and it was awesome!" - Senior PM
Link to the workshop for those wondering:
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Your best employees are often your most annoying ones.
They ask the most questions, they challenge things constantly. But that’s how we improve, that’s how we create better outcomes.
You don’t want YES people.
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Splitting the work as 'WHAT' vs 'HOW' doesn't work!
I see orgs do this all the time, they'll say things like "Leaders define the WHAT and teams are empowered to figure out the HOW"
But WHAT and HOW are dependent on optics.
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"Roadmapping is anti-agile. Instead, we should only have priorities."
This was a response to my product roadmaps article - discuss!
Are roadmaps anti-agile?
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I’ve been doing more freelance writing this year and its really interesting to see what the most searched product topics are.
You’d think it’s all the important stuff, like:
- Discovery
- Strategy
- How to interview users?
- How to conduct market analysis?
- …etc
1/
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Worthy Read: “The Trust-Communication Tradeoff” by Emily Levada -
“To accomplish any goal with two or more people, the amount of trust between the team members and the amount of communication required are inversely related.”
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Don't slice big initiatives/features down into stories...slice outcomes.
Once you've made your outcome small then slice stories to deliver. BETTER perform small experiments!
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Why we think we have a prioritization problem:
- Too many competing priorities
- No prioritization framework
- Not enough data
- Dependencies
Why we _actually_ have a prioritization problem:
1. No clear strategy
2. No clear strategy
3. No clear strategy
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People who message you with “hi” and wait for a response before asking their question really don’t understand how asynchronous communication works…
I’d like to see chat apps prompt users who do this: “consider sending your question so they can reply later”
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Product is a team sport, not a dictatorship.
Product Managers are NOT:
- the boss
- experts in design
- experts in engineering
- the sole decision maker
Instead Product Managers:
- create clarity
- connect the dots
- inspire and empower
- ensure work is valuable and viable
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One issue I've been pondering with "bring solutions, not problems" is it reinforces outputs > outcomes.
I'm seeing this play out with a client. Senior Mgmt want solutions, which creates action bias and pushes conversations to be solution focused...they miss the problem space.
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Product is a team sport!
As a result we often need to worry less about clear role boundaries and more about collaborating.
Clear boundaries often create:
- handover & coordination overheads.
- Gaps where info is lost
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One of your primary responsibilities as a leader is to create clarity.
Clarity on:
-context, strategy, vision, goals
-roles, careers, expectations
-culture, boundaries, what’s acceptable vs not,
-etc…
A lot of problems I see in orgs can boil down to a lack of clarity.
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Don't break down the solution, break down the problem first.
Too many teams I see jump straight into breaking down really large solutions rather than first breaking down the problem.
Read more in this weeks newsletter post 👇
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Breaking Product Discovery down to first principles:
In this week's post you’ll find:
- What is product discovery?
- 3 Core Components of Product Discovery
- the definition of done is for discovery
- who does product disocvery
and more...
1
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Research suggest that generalists make great Product Managers 💪
For a long time I struggled with identifying as being a generalist.
I always thought it was a super power but society suggests otherwise.
Turns out, it is!
Full post 👇
7
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"You don't have a prioritization problem, you have a strategy one"
The first question you should be asking yourself when it comes to prioritization is:
Does this align to our strategy?
Without a strategy, prioritization becomes very hard.
Because ideas are cheap.
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Being able to properly frame a problem can be a huge unlock.
One tool I use to help find the right level of optics on the problem space is called Abstract Laddering.
You can either move up the ladder, making your problem statement more abstract or down making it more concrete.
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I'd love to test this Product Scorecard with some of you.
The scorecard is designed to help PMs and founders reflect on their product and how it performs against several dimensions (Users, Market, Operations, Strategy, etc)
I'm looking to further test it and get more feedback🙏
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