093
Design & Delivery
10 min read
Visual Hierarchy: Make Product Priority Visible
Design visual hierarchy from user goals, consequences, and state; preserve meaning across semantics, responsive layouts, dynamic content, and product change.
The journal
Product notes for people who build.
Practical essays on product strategy, discovery, development, technology, and the work of turning ideas into useful products.
092
Product Strategy
13 min read
Product OKRs: Build a Decision Contract, Not a Scorecard
Design product OKRs around causal assumptions, team influence, guardrails, evidence, and reopening rules—so goals change decisions instead of just scoring work.
091
Design & Delivery
9 min read
Design Critiques: Test the Decision, Not the Designer
Run design critiques around a decision, its evidence, and its risks without turning feedback into taste voting or designer evaluation.
090
Design & Delivery
11 min read
Usability Studies: Test a Use Risk, Not the Interface
Design usability studies around specified users, goals, contexts, and release decisions—then turn observed breakdowns into bounded findings and action.
089
Product Strategy
12 min read
Early-Stage Startup Challenges: Diagnose Before You Act
Diagnose which early-stage constraint can invalidate the next decision, separate known risk from uncertainty, and choose a proportional response.
088
Product Strategy
12 min read
Discovery Habits: Make Evidence Hard to Skip
Design discovery habits around real commitment points, so teams expose uncertainty, connect evidence, and record exceptions before they lock in work.
087
Leadership & Organisation
12 min read
Professional Growth You Can See in the Work
Turn a vague development goal into a bounded capability experiment with a baseline, focused practice, feedback, reflection, and a transfer test.
086
Measurement & Growth
13 min read
Experiment Design: Engineer a Comparison You Can Interpret
Define the effect, population, randomisation unit, exposure, outcomes, power, and analysis before building a controlled product experiment.
085
Measurement & Growth
13 min read
Analytics Infrastructure: Reconstruct the Evidence Path
Design a controlled path from product behaviour to a reproducible answer, with explicit identity, time, consent, lineage, quality states, and change control.
084
Design & Delivery
11 min read
User Journey Mapping: Build an Evidence Model
Build user journey maps from observed behaviour, preserve branches and uncertainty, expose ownership gaps, and connect each finding to a product decision.
083
Leadership & Organisation
11 min read
Early Startup Team Building: Design the First Operating Model
Turn first hires into an operating team by defining purpose, membership, decision rights, coordination, disagreement, and review.
082
Design & Delivery
11 min read
Rapid Prototyping: Build the Evidence, Not the Product
Choose prototype fidelity from the decision and risk, test the smallest credible model, and end with evidence, limits, and an explicit next move.
081
Design & Delivery
12 min read
Smart Notifications: Earn the Right to Interrupt
Design notifications as earned interruptions: choose what deserves attention, use the least costly channel, protect control, and add ML only when needed.
080
Discovery & Validation
10 min read
Product Hypothesis Testing: Make Explanations Compete
Turn product hypotheses into competing explanations, discriminating evidence, explicit decision rules, and learning that survives an inconclusive result.
079
Measurement & Growth
11 min read
Product Metrics Practice: Make Every Number Reconstructable
Build product metrics as versioned measurement contracts with clear meaning, provenance, quality limits, ownership, migrations, and incident response.
078
Leadership & Organisation
11 min read
Practical Customer-Centricity for Product Teams
Bring customer evidence into product decisions without turning requests into specifications, overrepresenting vocal accounts, or mistaking rituals for value.
077
Design & Delivery
13 min read
From Theory to Practice: System Design for Product Managers
Translate product promises into system requirements: authoritative state, visible delay, failure recovery, workload shape, observability, and safe change.
076
Discovery & Validation
11 min read
Manager Coaching: Choose the Intervention, Not the Persona
Choose coaching, instruction, advice, constraint removal, or review based on decision stakes, authority, and the judgement the work must develop.
075
Product Strategy
11 min read
Quarterly Planning: Reset the Commitment System
Use quarterly planning to reconcile evidence, capacity, dependencies, and obligations—then replace stale commitments with an executable decision record.
074
Discovery & Validation
10 min read
Customer Discovery: Build a Problem Model Before You Build
Build a customer problem model from recent cases, role-aware recruitment, competing explanations, and evidence that changes the next product decision.
073
Leadership & Organisation
10 min read
The PM's Complete Guide to Stakeholder Alignment
Align stakeholders around a product decision: define the stakes, expose conflicts, assign roles, and preserve commitment as evidence changes.
072
Design & Delivery
12 min read
Lean MVP for Startups: Spend Runway on Evidence
Manage lean MVP work as a sequence of bounded exposures, where evidence must earn each increase in spend, operating burden, customer promise, and risk.
071
Discovery & Validation
11 min read
Concept Validation: Process, Example and Test Template
Plan a concept validation test with a practical process, a hypothetical B2B example, and a copyable brief. Observe behaviour and define the next decision.
070
Product Strategy
13 min read
Competitive Analysis That Changes Product Decisions
Model customer substitution, constraints, and response thresholds so competitor research changes product decisions instead of filling a feature grid.