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Articles by Tim Herbig
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Heading 12 Ideally, Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) help express what you want to achieve (outcome metrics), instead of only listing what you want to do (outputs). Using OKRs in Product Management means that Product Goals emerge from your Product Strategy Choices and serve as a bridge to inform your actions during Product Discovery and Delivery.
Die Produktwerker: Produktstrategie, OKRs und Discovery sinnvoll kombinieren
Viele Produktteams wirken nach außen extrem beschäftigt: Sie planen, tracken, messen, dokumentieren und liefern fleißig Features. Doch trotz all der Aktivität bleibt oft ein ungutes Gefühl: Kommt man wirklich voran – oder ist man einfach nur beschäftigt? Weiterlesen nach der Anzeige In dieser Podcastfolge spricht Oliver Winter mit Tim Herbig, Produktcoach, Autor und langjähriger Begleiter von Produktteams, über die zentrale Frage: Was macht echten Fortschritt aus?
Product Practice #307: How to Turn Company OKRs into Product OKRs
There are two fixes when teams can’t influence their Key Results because they are out of reach: Expanding their Sphere of Influence through shared OKRs Shrinking the out-of-reach KR into their Sphere of influence This newsletter is about the latter.
Product Practice #306: How to Avoid Alibi Progress
When feeling stuck in alibi progress, teams try to dig deeper into whatever domain they’re stuck with. Examples for staying in motion without making progress: Try talking to more users to unlock “the one insight” that will make you believe a problem is worth solving. Rewrite your lagging OKRs after reading another thought leaders’ book. Or translate your ambiguous product strategy into another canvas, hoping it will make it more tangible.
Product Practice #305: Research Projects vs. Product Discovery
Research activities are an important enabler to reduce uncertainty during Product Discovery. But that doesn’t mean the weeks-long research study your boss outsourced frees you from Product Discovery. Research Projects aren’t “wrong” or “bad” per se, but we must understand their traits to recognize (and change) when they should be used – and when not. Research Projects are effective at deeply understanding a completely new playing field as part of strategic company shifts.
Product Practice #304: The Consequences of Strategy Choices
As mentioned last week, I’m a big fan of using flexible structures to define Product Strategy. One of the core ideas is the modular relationship between: The high-level Product Strategy Patterns and The individual Product Strategy components shaping a pattern in a specific context. (I recently heard about Rob Hayes’s talk on “Atomic Strategy” – Kudos to him for giving that structure a memorable name).
Product Practice #303: A Field Guide for Visual Product Thinkers
Many frameworks describe how strategy should work, but few offer concise, practical structures that align with teams’ fundamental work and enduring Strategy Patterns. Product Strategy is more than just structured workshops; it emerges from the messy middle between company priorities and practical synthesis. A tool particularly useful for navigating this complexity is the Product Field.
Product Practice #302: Impact Mapping Helps You Answer These Discovery Questions
As a structural tool, Impact Mapping helps you zoom in and -out of the micro of Product Discovery. On a macro level, it helps you bring order to the insights artifacts you have: IMPACT: How clear is the strategic focus? „Increase revenue“ is unspecific. „+34% margins of self-service Australian agency customers“ is specific. ACTORS: How contextual are the segments you want to focus on? „Tim, 34, likes coffee“ is irrelevant to any business goal.
Product Practice #300: 7 Things I learned from writing a Weekly Product Management Newsletter for 7 Years
This week’s issue is a bit different from your typical program. I want to take a moment to celebrate the 300th(!) issue of this newsletter. Sorry for the non-existent product management tips this week, but humor me as I go down memory lane. I’ve been writing and sending newsletters in various formats since 2010, but I consider this newsletter shown below from September 2016 to be the first one as far as weekly publishing goes (except for my seasonal writing breaks).
Product Practice #299: Understanding Input and Output Metrics
Independent of the specific metric “framework” (think NSMs or OKRs), companies need a clear understanding when asking teams to work on their Input or Output Metrics. From my perspective, two approaches exist to develop shared language: The deterministic definition and the relative position of metrics. Personally, I associate the deterministic definition with the work of Josh Seiden (and others). Outputs are shipped features, produced artifacts, or completed activities to drive an Outcome.
Product Practice #298: Treat your Product Strategy like a Product
At the end of a workshop on “Useful Product Metrics” I ran this week, participants wondered how many of these concepts would “fit together.” Even though I try to avoid large, connected concepts (since this is not an all-or-nothing proposition), I tried my best to paint an oversimplified picture for an imaginary strategy choice of a trading app around “getting teenagers to invest in their retirement.” How to put this Theory into Practice: Your Product Strategy can be informed by less specific...
Product Practice #296: How to use Leading and Lagging Indicators in your OKRs
Most product teams review goals in hindsight to gauge success. But what if you didn’t have to wait until completion to start evaluation, allowing better clarity into the actions you take to reach those goals? After all, building products is about learning and iterating, which requires setting and measuring metrics that lead you toward your ultimate goal. Lags between your actions and measuring success hinder that course correction.
Product Practice #295: How to go from Research Intent to Useful User Outcomes
Many product teams perceive the focus on User Outcomes as arbitrary goal-setting and the opposite of serving users. And it‘s easy to understand why. Many widely shared examples of User Outcomes out there read like this: „Users buy more tickets“ „Customers use more integrations. “ „Returning shoppers add more items to their basket.“ A product leader recently approached me after a conference talk, sharing his team‘s concerns that Outcomes would just be repackaged business goals.
Product Practice #294: How to Scale Product Discovery
Many teams find themselves stuck between uneven adoption of Product Discovery and adaptable and evidence-focused Discovery practices. If you’re in an organization that is already partially bought-in to Discovery, but which has mixed adoption, you need a game plan that can help you navigate this middle area.
Product Practice #293: Do you need Department OKRs?
Regarding how many hierarchical levels one should cover through OKRs, the same rule applies to eating cookies past bedtime: The fewer, the better. Intermediate organizational layers like departments, programs, or areas can be beneficial when they provide a narrowed focus “below” the company perspective (given the critical size of the organization that justifies these levels). But they can also create bureaucratic overhead when treated like a gatekeeper.
Product Practice #291: Discovery Motions vs. Discovery Decisions
My Self-Paced Product Strategy Course is Available Learn how to connect Strategy Threads into a Seamless Approach. My Path to Product Strategy Course enables you to form, execute, and measure the progress of coherent Product Strategy Choices based on structure and evidence. Prices start at 497€ (excl. VAT).
Product Practice #290: Time-boxing Discovery should Match your Capabilities
I hope you were able to enjoy the last few weeks of summer as much as possible. I dedicated a good amount of time to recharging, reading, and enjoying family time. I’m also eager to get back into the weekly rhythm of this newsletter–So let’s dive right in. Does the complaint “this Discovery takes too long” sound familiar? I’ve heard it throughout my career and from teams I’m coaching. And, you know what, most Discoveries do take too long.
Product Practice #289: Linked Better Practices over Stacked Best Practices
What is the right way to approach aspects like creating Product Strategy, defining OKRs, or pursuing Product Discovery activities? Especially when teams are starting, teams might look for existing playbooks and stick rigidly to them. But that approach quickly starts to break. The Problem with Stacked Best Practices Some teams will end up with “Stacked Best Practices.” This might come in the form of always using the same strategy template and insisting on a certain way to fill it.
Product Practice #288: How Leading Indicators are Defined by Context
One of the most undervalued aspects of Key Results is how detectable the changes are on a weekly bases throughout the cycle to allow the team to adapt their actions. A lot of teams focus on easy-to-document but hard-to-influence lagging indicators when they should seek to identify and use leading indicators to define their OKRs. And even though there are some common patterns of what types of Key Results are often rather lagging or leading, another ingredient is often missing: A team’s context.
Product Practice #287: Horizontal and Vertical Strategy Coherence
Enrollment for Cohort 4 of Path to Product Strategy is now open The next live cohort of my Path to Product Strategy course kicks-off on September 20, 2:00 PM (CEST)/08:00 AM (EDT) and enrollment is now open. Throughout four 3,5h live sessions, I will teach you how to form, execute, and measure the progress of coherent Product Strategy Choices based on structure and evidence. Besides cohort-based learning among practitioners, you also get access to a 1:1 implementation session with me.
Product Practice #284: Measuring Product Discovery Adoption
When defining measures for how “successful” Product Discovery should look in your organization, think beyond performance metrics like the sheer number of experiments. Instead, add indicators about quality.
Product Practice #283: Just Enough Strategy
This week’s newsletter is inspired by a subscriber’s question: “What the heck product strategy actually is, and how do I put it into practice.”So, humor me while I work through an oversimplified take that hopefully provides a realistic starting point without missing the mark of strategic thinking. It makes sense to go back to the question of what you/your team/your company need to get out of Product Strategy.
Product Practice #281: The Gaps of Product Discovery
Independent of their exact definition of success, the struggles of most organizations I meet and get to work with when trying to scale practices internally can be mapped to one of three core gaps of Product Discovery: A systemic gap A skill gap An insights gap The Systemic Gap of Product Discovery You know your current way of practicing Product Discovery falls short of expectations and is rooted in a systemic gap when you experience one of these symptoms: Discovery and Delivery are owned and...
Product Practice #279: How to Think about Choosing Discovery Tools
Spoiler alert/disclaimer: At the end of this week’s newsletter, I mention Reveall, a product discovery platform where product teams connect their product strategy, priorities, and customer insights to drive outcomes.
Product Practice #278: Product Strategy is a Matter of Connected Layers
Newsletter Announcement No. 1 After years of running with an impromptu and, frankly, invisible name for this newsletter, I’ve decided to change the name to Product Practice for a better reflection of the focus of my work. Besides the name (and a new coat of paint in a few weeks), nothing will change (including the hard-earned streak of weekly counting issues). Newsletter Announcement No. 2 I’m launching a referral program for Product Practice (see, already putting the new name to work).
Four Problems with “Traditional” User Recruiting - Product Thoughts #277
Spoiler alert/disclaimer: At the end of this week’s newsletter, I mention Orbital, a startup addressing these problems with user recruitment. I recently joined them as an advisor! There are few things the product management industry can agree on. But the importance of enabling product teams to access first-hand user feedback whenever they need it is probably one of them.
How to make evidence-informed Product Discovery Decisions
Claude Shannon once said, “Information is the resolution of uncertainty.” For Product Teams, the quote has to be rephrased as “Evidence leads to a reduction of uncertainty.” And while Product Discovery is about gathering evidence to reduce uncertainty, there is such a thing as 𝘁𝗼𝗼 𝗺𝘂𝗰𝗵 evidence. But what separates information from evidence? Here are the brief definitions that summarize my perspective: Information describes raw, often context-less, incoming data and can include opinions.
How Impact Mapping connects to OKRs
This week’s deep dive follows last week’s Impact Mapping Clinic Recording. One of the most common questions about Impact Mapping is how it relates to other frameworks and practices. It’s been a while since I compared Impact Mapping to other frameworks. So, this week, I’ll take a closer look at my perspective on how Impact Mapping does not just compare to Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) but how it connects to them.
The Timelines of NSMs, Strategy, and OKRs
It’s difficult to define an exact timeline, but Vision and NSM are about the (potentially) infinite product development journey, whereas Strategy has a (varying) time horizon. In a recent conversation, Stephanie Leue, Chief Product Officer at Doodle, told me that “finding that balance in your Product Strategy is challenging.
Product Goals: Using Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) for Agile Teams
Published: Mar 7, 2016 | Last updated: Jan 20, 2021 | 19 min read This is my complete guide to Product Goals in 2021.
Product Discovery Webinar Recording
Product Discovery Webinar Recording Does this sound familiar? You're rushed into discussing solutions, before even understanding the problem. Instead of focussing on problems, new features are all that’s talked about in your company. There’s no integral step to focus on the problem space as part of your work and you wish you’d have more time to make user input part of the discussion much earlier on. Your priorities change. A lot. Constantly. The topics that are “important” change with every new sprint.
The Difference between Impact Mapping OKRs
Analysis Over the years, I’ve developed and refined my own interpretation of Impact Mapping (learn more about that here). But especially during my training and talks, I often get questions about how Impact Mapping relates to other frameworks out there.
How Design Sprints and Product Discovery play together
If we map those days and activities to the possible phases of a Product Discovery, we end up with a rough allocation like this: 80% of a Design Sprint is spent in the solution space. It's about creating ideas, prioritizing them, creating prototypes, and validating them (at least from a qualitative angle). This means that a Design Sprint represents a compressed version of the Discovery activities Ideation, Creation, and Validation.
The Difference between Impact Mapping and...
Over the years, I’ve developed and refined my own interpretation of Impact Mapping (learn more about that here). But especially during my training and talks, I often get questions about how Impact Mapping relates to other frameworks out there. So, this email is an attempt to clarify some of these questions. Both, from my perspective, as well as other practitioners.
How do you Make Product Management Work Effectively in a Distributed Team?
Ever since the shift towards agile practices, product teams have hung on to a set of core attributes, which range from cross-functional, to customer-centric, all the way up to iterative and independent. But there’s one aspect which should vanish from this list of must-haves: co-located.
Build Your Own Product Discovery Toolbox
When a Product Team starts a new Product Discovery mission, their primary job is to reduce uncertainty. Initial alignment and research might feel predictable and almost linear. But as soon as the first hypothesis turns out to be wrong, teams need to course correct. The complexity of Product Discovery can feel overwhelming, but trying to overcome it with blueprints developed by other companies is rarely a viable solution. It’s way more important to evolve your own approach.
Making Collaborative User Interviews happen in Remote Teams - Product Thoughts #160
By now, most of your social feeds and inboxes have probably already been filled with general “remote emergency advice”. While I have strong experiences and feelings about a lot of fundamental aspects of remote work, I don’t just want to add to the noise which is already out there. Instead, I want to provide you with my very tactical playbook on how you can continue to execute user research in collaboration with your product team.
Differentiating Outcomes and Outputs in Practice - Product Thoughts #159
Whenever I work with product teams on putting my iterated version of Impact Mapping into practice, most of them stumble at the same stage: Differentiating Outputs from Outcomes. You might have heard of this before. But let me assure you, that I rarely see, so product teams realize the difference through the visual connection/differentiation of those elements. Now, here’s what often unlocks an aha moment for people: Thinking about what you want to do with that Outcome and rephrasing it.
Should you use OKR for Product Discovery? - Product Thoughts #158
Most teams have a hard time breaking the wheel of getting caught-up in delivery work. While Product Discovery focusses on the problem space, a lot of Key Results focus on Delivery and business results (which is another discussion by itself). The biggest problem here is that this draws the attention away from the Discovery activities of a team. By agreeing on, and regularly revisiting, a dedicated Discovery OKR, teams can raise the awareness for this (often unseen) part of their work.
A Practical Guide for Agile Product Managers
The book will teach you to... ...understand the definition and impact of lateral leadership. ...lead an agile team of domain experts as a generalist. ...solve conflicts when you're not the boss. My book on Lateral Leadership for Product Managers was published by Sense and Respond Press - The publisher for short practical business books. The book helps you master the challenges of being a lateral leader - In small-scale startups and large corporations alike.
How to Stay on Course During Product Discovery
Product discovery is a messy, hard, and often thankless job. Quite frankly, there’s no way — or need — to sugarcoat this. Product discovery is also rarely linear, let alone foreseeable. There’s also no one-size-fits-all approach to doing it “perfectly.” As a result, product teams need to have high confidence in their ability to pick from and execute a broad range of techniques.
Product Discovery
This is my complete guide to Product Discovery in 2020.
40 Product Management Books you should read in 2019
If you want to progress your career as a product manager, learning through reading books is undoubtedly a great way to do so. That is why I’ve put together this comprehensive collection of Product Management Books which will help you to improve your skills across a broad range. For which domain of Product Management do you want to learn more about? Product Management Essentials Inspired by Marty Cagan Inspired v1 was of the first books I ever read on ‘modern’ product development.
A Guide through Responsibilities
Not every company provides enough clarity about the product management tasks which are expected from their employees. That’s why this extensive guide will walk you through the general expectations on that role and which specific domains you need to master to become a successful Product Manager.
A Guide through Responsibilities
Not every company provides enough clarity about the product management tasks which are expected from their employees. That’s why this extensive guide will walk you through the general expectations on that role and which specific domains you need to master to become a successful Product Manager.
Practical Tips for Working in Distributed Product Teams
Ever since the shift towards agile practices, product teams have hung on to a set of core attributes, ranging from cross-functional, to customer-centric all the way up to iterative. But there’s one aspect which will soonish vanish from this list of must-haves: co-located. The notion that successful product teams strictly need to operate from within one room is outdated.
Practical Tips for Working in Distributed Product Teams
Ever since the shift towards agile practices, product teams have hung on to a set of core attributes, ranging from cross-functional, to customer-centric all the way up to iterative. But there’s one aspect which will soonish vanish from this list of must-haves: co-located. The notion that successful product teams strictly need to operate from within one room is outdated.
How do you Make Product Management Work Effectively in a Distributed Team?
Ever since the shift towards agile practices, product teams have hung on to a set of core attributes, which range from cross-functional, to customer-centric, all the way up to iterative and independent. But there’s one aspect which should vanish from this list of must-haves: co-located.
How to Apply Lateral Leadership in Agile Environments by Tim Herbig
Lateral leadership describes the art of efficiently influencing others around you without formal authority. It is essential for succeeding in the implicit leadership position that product managers find themselves in. In this talk from this year’s MTP Engage in Hamburg, I share some advice on how product people can use lateral leadership in managing agile teams.
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