Welcome. Product, Briefly is a collection of one-page briefs about building products and the people who create them, drawn from two decades of work in new ventures spanning a breadth of industries. Each one can be read in five minutes and discussed for an hour. They cover cover different facets of Product work while also serving as examples of the form.

It’s built to be taken apart: use what fits straight away, draw inspiration from the collection, make the rest your own. Take a brief, or make a brief.

No conflict, no story

Tension and pressure exist within and without. We each feel these forces inside, between teammates and groups, and used well we feel it embodied compelling products.

When we understand the difference between tension and pressure, we can recognize it and hold onto it to respond instead of just reacting.
Soon we’re able to put it to work with others in pursuit of excellence.

Pull & Push

Action and change come from pressure and tension. Both are so powerful we feel them in our bodies. Tension is a pull that we follow irresistibly, pressure pushes us whether we like it or not.

• Tension is about alleviating a pull towards something we crave: attraction, curiosity, wanting.

• Pressure is about alleviating a push from something we avoid: quotas, deadlines, and authority.

Notice the pull and the push, who uses which, and when. We respond differently to each one.
Trailblazers pull followers with tension, tyrants only know Pressure, and masterful marketers use both. Tension has a magnetism but can fade without proximity, Pressure can be effective but is capped by the equilibrium point of relief. When we understand both, their masterful modulation shapes performance; over the long-term, tactful tension leads to happiness while pressure eventually crushes.

Steel holds tension, concrete is unrivaled under pressure. Steel-reinforced concrete built modern marvels.

Product tension

Interesting products exude a team’s hard choices. Tug of war between tradeoffs produces a better product faster. Great products have a tension you can feel, if attuned. Sense competing disciplines: engineering / design is the classic. The push and pull between Desirability, Feasibility, Viability: elegance vs makability, luxury vs cost, soft touch paint vs. durability.
No tension? Things end up inelegant, overbuilt, over designed, over-hyped, and ultimately forgettable.

Feel it, hold it, wield it

Many don’t recognize when they are in pulled or pushed, simply reacting on instinct; some of us know what’s happening yet can’t help ourselves. The coolest understand and act independently of it.
Success is proportional to one’s ability to manage these forces: recognizing, resisting, and creating them.

• Recognize. Notice the feeling throughout the day. Tune in.

• Respond. Don’t react. Hold impulses. Resist for a bit, then a bit more. Here is where we start to build power, by becoming immune to forces others impart upon us. Get in uncomfortable situations, and revel in the pull and push.

• Reveal. Learn to create forces in others. Control internally, then externally. More controlled release creates more action. Now, we can let tension rise in Product tradeoffs, modulating so things don’t snap apart but instead resolve elevated in ways that make customers care. Meanwhile, pressure delicately applied helps us deliver the goods on target timing / cost / quality.

No force, no movement

Scarcity, status, attention, ambition. Tension and pressure range in flavors, so learn delicious recipes.
Want hungry customers? Time to sell that roadmap? Gotta get that decision made ASAP? Need to get a team of Engineers and Designers to explore for a while without jumping into solutions?

Sources of forces surround us:

• Unanswered questions

• The “Got a minute?” Slack with no follow up, or “We need to talk” text message

• Limited time offer!

• Drawn into that argument that you know you should resist

• That thing left unfinis

Originally published on productbriefly.com

Want practice?
Choosing better solutions is a great place to start.

Build tension

Learning to use tension starts inside, then works outwards through team to Product.

• Self. Learn to respond and create tension yourself. This works well when you’ve got a peer on the same journey, or a mentor. Share the brief, share stories, build mastery over a month or so.

• Team. With a basic proficiency, you’ll inevitably start putting this into practice with the team. It will soon be clear it’s time to elevate their abilities to thrive with tension, and here the brief is useful. When in on the game, they play it to do better work and know to avoid brinksmanship.

• Product. To embody Tension in products, take the techniques back to key tradeoffs. Thoughtfully raise the tension, without creating conflict, when dealing with opposing forces - cost vs. customer value, or design elegance vs engineering execution, etc - because it’s how these resolve that elevates your outcomes.

Start today

Too conceptual?
Here’s a list of practical exercises and experiments to get started before the today is over, carrying into tomorrow, with a download link of the pdf for easy team discussion.

• Look down at your hands right now. NOW. What are they touching? Is it a smartphone, or a laptop, or some other technology rectangle? Look carefully - where do you think the teams had to make hard tradeoffs - where can you feel them, and the tension they create - draft angles, cost vs. the screen quality, etc?

• Check your task list - personal, work, whatever, doesn’t matter. Pick one task that makes you feel pressure to do (you’ve been punting it) and one that makes you feel tension (you can’t wait to jump on it). Why? What commitment, joy, reward, or sense of progress is bound to that task? Why? Where did it come from - or who - and how?

Read more

Welcome. Product, Briefly is a collection of one-page briefs about building products and the people who create them, drawn from two decades of work in new ventures spanning a breadth of industries. Each one can be read in five minutes and discussed for an hour. They cover cover different facets of Product work while also serving as examples of the form.

It’s built to be taken apart: use what fits straight away, draw inspiration from the collection, make the rest your own. Take a brief, or make a brief.

Speedboats & ocean freighters

One gets a small team up to speed quickly and turns on a dime, the other needs space and time to get going or change direction, but smashes through ocean swells and moves tons of goods.
They are different boats for doing different work.

Which do you need to get the job done?

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Momentum Matters

“Occasionally, scaling down and intensifying gives you the big advantage”

~ Charlie Munger

Big impact sometimes requires a big complex program, but not always. Products live and die by momentum.

Physics terms get casually tossed about when discussing projects: team velocity, friction, resistance to adoption, escape velocity. Momentum, however, is one concept from physics which aptly applies to leading a product program and troubleshooting when it’s not working well. Have you ever…

• Increased the size of a team, only to have a program grind to a halt?

• Needed to change direction, and sometimes found it quick and other times laborious (or impossible)?

• Made feature or scope cuts to a Product and felt progress accelerate?

A quick rehash on the physics of Momentum from Wikipedia:

In Newtonian mechanics, momentum is the product of the mass and velocity of an object. It is a vector quantity, possessing a magnitude and a direction. If m is an object's mass and v is its velocity (also a vector quantity), then the object's momentum p (from Latin pellere "push, drive") is:

Physics of Product

• m: mass. Scope and scale of the product and its team. Leaders sense this. It’s resources allocated, features specified, promises made, dreams yet unshattered.

• v: velocity. Directional speed at which things are completed. Everybody feels this. It’s milestones hit or missed, schedule brought in or pushed out, a work item that never quite leaves the standup, or the Executive who’s either happily surprised at progress or pissed he’ll get roasted at the board meeting. Direction matters; lots of speed pointed the wrong way makes momentum a problem.

• p: momentum. Resiliency to obstacles, increasing intensity, and a sense of inevitability. This is tougher to pin down, but the Product Leader benefits from attuning to it. Increasing momentum feels good, as you can blast through challenges. Decreasing momentum feels like losing pace of progress, little obstacles causing big disruptions, or resources getting pulled away. Vectors matter.

Increasing momentum

• Boost speed. Optimize communication and resources, and the team gets more done faster.

• Add resources. Inject capital and put it to work. Sometimes things can slow down in transient, but this is OK because you can increase velocity once work is allocated to that new resource set.

• Cut complexity. Kill features and scope to better use your team, or cut teamwork overhead.

Losing momentum

• Too much complexity. Team is avoiding cuts to Product or scope creep has not been dealt with.

• Communications are overloaded. Too many meetings and updates, not enough work getting done.

• Insufficient resources to overcome momentum loss. Undercapitalized, or the right people are not working on your project. Lots of losses happen when the wrong people are involved.

Originally published on productbriefly.com

So how do we use momentum?

This might sound complicated, but it’s not. That doesn’t mean it’s not sometimes difficult, but we can make it easier. It comes down to two things:

• Adjusting momentum to suit the situation

• Directing the momentum you have to work for you not against you

Let’s dig into some practical ways to approach these.

Read more

Welcome. Product, Briefly is a collection of one-page briefs about building products and the people who create them, drawn from two decades of work in new ventures spanning a breadth of industries. Each one can be read in five minutes and discussed for an hour. They cover cover different facets of Product work while also serving as examples of the form.

It’s built to be taken apart: use what fits straight away, draw inspiration from the collection, make the rest your own. Take a brief, or make a brief.

Over the past 20 years, I’ve watched “product development” evolve as a discipline. My entry point was an interdisciplinary one, and at the IDEO-attributed approach of Design Thinking was just beginning its trajectory to drive a field that had historically been a Marketing function since the golden age of Madison Avenue. Later, Agile-inspired fast iteration methodologies would shift the power to Engineering as shipping the MVP and then improving it with customer insights became the prevailing wisdom of the Lean-era. The three legs of the stool - Marketing. Design. Engineering- remained the same, but the locus of control shifted with the zeitgeist, as people talked about IDEO’s shopping carts, Steve Blank’s epiphany, while everyone moved fast and things broke.

During that time, my hands got dirty building almost every possible type of product: business services, enterprise technology, mobile apps & consumer web, ad-tech, consumer electronics, cloud computing, vehicle electrification, energy storage for renewables and nuclear… the list goes on.
However, it was the simplest products that taught me the most, the ones where there was no complexity to hide behind when the Market loved it (or didn’t).

Markets are dynamic ecosystems. The path of progress constantly reshapes them, rarely fast as a seismic shift erupting and more often slow and powerful like a glacier that pushes mountains and leaves valleys. In this wake, new flora and fauna fight to flourish. The slow massive changes are more common and powerful, but don’t make for entertaining news stories.

Everyone is impacted by forces of progress, and anyone who wants to pay attention can observe the struggle for life in the new niches exposed. Viewpoints scale as fractals, with increasing scope and time. Life in the pond formed after the storm, which evaporates in summer. Vibrant forests, ravaged by fire, regrow and their ecosystem re-evolves over decades. Oceans retreat to leave shells in a desert now supporting mice and owls and lizards for millennia. Stars collapse, leaving black holes in the universe with such gravity that matter and light can’t escape.

The universe hates a vacuum. Pay attention. Look where progress leaves voids in its wake, and the opportunities are always endless.

Explore edges

Markets pull products. If you’ve got a Product in mind but the Market boundaries blur, look more closely. Here’s what you might see:

• New entries ravage ecosystems thought to be stable. We used to have a record industry, they sold CD’s too. Until the internet enabled digital music, then the Walkman got eaten by the MP3 player. The smartphone had headphones, and it ate the MP3 player and then streaming ate the Record industry. I love my vinyl collection, but not because it’s easier to use or more convenient or cheaper or sounds better.

• Whipsaws. Oscillations jerk a system around, rippling customer preferences because we buy based upon emotions not logic and scarcity hits hard. Gas prices have made big cars smaller, then bigger, then hybrid, then electric, then hybrid again, then who knows. The one thing that consistently changes is what to look for, but its reverberations keep opportunities endless.

• Needs that never change. Water, shelter, food, joy: people can’t have happy lives without them, and those same people have harbored vices since forever. All of this is fair game, but personally I’d rather work on exhilarating music experiences or abundant clean energy than vapes and making everything gambling. You do you. What always changes is the present - so how can what we have at hand today and can expect tomorrow be applied to what never changes?

All of these examples reveal a connected system, where change creates a void where a product that’s the right shape fits in at the right time.

Bring this brief to your team to discuss the true shape of your Market opportunity. When blind spots emerge - they typically do - consider a sprint tighten up Market Requirements. Let your product respond to Market pull, rather than fight with a push.

Holes in the Universe

Market, Unmet Needs, and the void your Product fills

Customers, Users, and competition are part of your Market - but focusing only on these is like looking at the seashore and saying the landscape is just the water while ignoring the sand, grasses, and gulls. Market is the environment in which a Product lives, so understand the Market in such a way so that you thrive within its vibrant interconnected ecosystem.

What is your hole in the universe?

This question cuts to the core of a Market opportunity: a bounded emptiness waiting to be filled. Define your corner of the universe and describe the boundaries of a void in detail. What do the surrounding edges look like – and what are their fluctuations? How might a Product have interfaces that interlock to shift in this dynamic environment? What causes things to move?

Unmet Needs not Problems

Builders see a Problem and feel an urge to solve, but this may be premature. Solution pushing leads teams astray by focusing on what works rather than what’s wanted, and the intricacies of solving can overshadow the environment that a Problem exists within. Problem statements spawn debates about “how painful is this, and are we making a Vitamin, Painkiller, or Cure?“

Voids have gravity. Markets pull. How strong is the Unmet Need? What’s the tension to meet it?

Joy is lovely example. Mental gymnastics to justify something as a Problem worth solving become unnecessary when “here’s how this will make people 10x happier” is valid.

Questions to clarify a Hole in the Universe and Unmet Need

• Who do you seek to serve: Who is the User, who is the Customer, & what’s the difference?

• What one simple thing improves 10x in the User’s life thanks to your Product?

• What’s the path between Awareness that your product exists and full-adoption?

• What’s the lifetime of the Customer look like: how long is it, and how much will they pay?

• What makes the User experience seem to Customers like it’s worth more than the price?

• How do Users tell others about your Product - how early and how often does that happen?

• What other things is a Customer compelled to spend money on instead of your Product?

• How does the Customer find out about alternatives, and where do you fit in?

• Have you found a compelling Positioning statement for your product?

Build Products with pull

Cascade from a Market with an Unmet Need into a Product that delivers on Specifications:

• Market Requirements clarify the void in the universe you intend to fill.

• Product Requirements describe the thing that you think will fill that void.

• Technical Requirements spell out how to deliver what fills the void to Specifications.

Originally published on productbriefly.com

Share Product, Briefly

Map your space

Invest 30 minutes with your team, using the brief to prompt a Market discussion. Look for surprising connections and hidden opportunities.

Get a sense of how well you all understand the environment, your role in it, and the boundaries of the hole you seek to fill. If if feels incomplete, consider putting together a Market Requirements Doc (MRD) that will let you see the space carved out for your Product.

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Constraints focus efforts.
Writing clarifies thinking.
One page does both.

A decent one-pager converts abstract intentions into shared understanding. Used well, a strong brief can help a team explore new territory, create shared commitments, and deliver on strategy.

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Brevity, origins, and applications

Churchill sent a memo to his War Cabinet in 1940, entitled Brevity. Reports were to be written in “short, crisp paragraphs” and no longer than a single page. He was tired of jargon, and wasted time “spent looking for the essential points.”

It worked so well it became a staple of the Western military.
However, that’s not actually where my journey started.

Advertising arrived in a golden age during the 1960s. Marketing, media, and manufacturing converged into a creative revolution where now an industry catering to the Consumer learned to sell emotions, brands, and ideals. Creative Briefs were born to bridge the client’s business goals to the eccentric art department without anything getting lost in translation.

In the early 2010s, I was building technology for clients in the advertising industry, and that’s where I learned the brief. Later, while leading a Product team at a consumer electronics company, a brief became a necessary prerequisite to any meaningful work; some were like Churchill’s, others more like Madison Avenue’s. Product briefs, strategy briefs, phase briefs, design briefs… the list goes on.

One page, broad applications. Constraints, clarity, communication.

Sharpening the stylus

It was later that I refined the practice of quickly drafting a brief, using it to gather input, refine it, and set direction. While leading a team building a little consumer device for a Silicon Valley cloud storage startup, briefs became a foundation for creating shared language for direction, scope, and success. This practice persists with me now, across the teams I’ve built and led, people I’ve helped grow, and programs I’ve run. It’s simple, fast, and effective.
Our teams use briefs to chase out ambiguity, communicate vision, and get everyone pointed in the same direction. Briefs are clear sketches for bold concepts.

Communication not documentation

Please take just one key point away from this:

Briefs are an artifact of thinking and discussion.

Documents don’t matter. Thinking - alone, together, and distributed - is what gets the work done. Writing a brief and cutting it down to a page forces a person to think through what they’re getting at. Taking that page and letting others read it and then discussing it rounds out the thinking of the group and surfaces the hidden factors and drives agreement. Integrating the thinking of the group, then cutting it back down to a single page, reshapes the thinking to be collective and compresses it and forces prioritization. Revising it so anyone attached to the work can quickly understand it and their relationship to it means clear thinking propagates. Work accelerates.

Louder, for the people in the back

• One page is a useful constraint that forces clarity of thinking and prioritization.

• Briefs are an artifact of thinking and discussion.

• Drafting, discussing, integrating, revising, and distributing is what makes an effective brief.

Don’t be too clever.

Share

The methods you’ll find in Product, Briefly are all built upon this concept. Below you’ll find the brief I share with teams new to the concept.

To make it easy to jump start your own team, you can download a .pdf version and discuss it with your people, and take the whole concept for an easy test-drive.

Briefs, Briefly

“Give me the freedom of a tight brief.”

~David Ogilvy

Briefs are for establishing shared context for work done together, or getting clarity for work done alone.
A brief says “this has been given thought and is worthy of consideration.”

Creating a brief chases out ambiguity and forces collaboration. It's not a magic document, but rather the significance lies in what happens in order to arrive at that artifact. We set a common target before starting and accountability for getting it done. A good brief contains at least what we're after and how we know we've achieved it, who's important to include, and when it's due.

There are many different types of briefs:

• Exploratory: how we'll think about the right questions to ask, and how we'll know when we've reached the right questions to answer.

• Strategy: our plan, where we'll play (and won't), and what winning looks like.

• Assignment: what we intend to do and why it’s significant.

• Product: outlining some value you hope to create in the world, that the world will compensate you for.

• Creative: any guardrails and inspiration for new types of exploration.

No template, no secrets, no style points. Simply put in the work to be concisely on the same single page, and be accountable for what you said you were going to do. Briefs are to keep the reference point visible.

Some thoughts on the creative brief from the ad-agency world:

What is the creative brief? It is a blueprint, a guide, even a source of inspiration. It details our objectives, audience/community, message or utility, the context in which we’ll engage, timing and budget. In short, the what, who, where, when.

The brief is the what we are doing. The creative is the how.

Where can you put briefs to work today?

Originally published on productbriefly.com

Start today

Lead by example - pick one pressing topic together, and volunteer to draft the first one-pager.
You can jump-start thing with Briefs, Briefly and use it to activate your discussion; it’s a one-page .pdf so you can load it into Slack and chat asynchronously, attach it to a calendar item and talk over video, or print it to pass around the boardroom.

Download Briefs, Briefly

Read more

Welcome. Product, Briefly is a collection of one-page briefs about building products and the people who create them, drawn from two decades of work in new ventures spanning a breadth of industries. Each one can be read in five minutes and discussed for an hour. They cover cover different facets of Product work while also serving as examples of the form.

It’s built to be taken apart: use what fits straight away, draw inspiration from the collection, make the rest your own. Take a brief, or make a brief.

The notion of building something wonderful and providing it to a thriving delighted customer base is captivating. Change the world! Scale to the moon! 🚀

This is the dream, right?

Too often it ends up a nightmare.
Stuff that took countless hours and dollars to make goes unsold. Perhaps it sells fast, but customers return it and never come back, sucking money away with that grinding churning sound. Maybe customers love it, but it seems like the ends never meet and more customers means more work - but no money comes out the other end to keep things afloat. Worst, nobody cares.
These are Product problems, and so many are avoidable.
All stem from people working on something that wasn’t the Right Product.

As a salesperson, builder, Founder, educator, advisor, consultant, and Executive, I’ve seen and experienced a thousand ways this gets mucked up, and pulled many out of the mire. Standing on something strong and pulling things back on track is what the brief below gets used for. Frequently.

Set foundations

Right Product is the idea of shaping the thing such that people want it, that it can actually get delivered, and that it supports the business in a way that earns the right to keep after it until things click with the Market to launch success. Everything else is built on top: who works on it, how it’s messaged (and to whom), how it’s made, and what it costs. All of it falls down if the foundation isn’t stable.

Countless conversations with businesspeople that want to launch something new, students that see potential for a project to become their job, aspiring Founders that want to make the leap, and scientists that envision their lab innovation out among the stars or changing an industry all had the same shape: they had pieces of the Product puzzle, but not the whole picture roughed out.

So, that’s what this brief is for; after writing it up in 2020 to help an R&D team understand what a Product looks like, it’s been used over and over again. It’s the thing to stand on and get heads above the quicksand.

Worried the team’s great idea may not be the Right Product, and need a little backup for the discussion? Is someone’s invention totally detached from actually fitting a Market? Is the beautiful concept completely unbuildable given your resources? Is the expectation of what a customer will pay totally unhinged from what it will cost to get the thing in their hands?

Product, Simplified

“The only thing that matters is getting to product/market fit.
Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.”
~ Marc Andreessen, (2007)

Products are a good or service offered to a Market at a chosen price, delivered repeatably at manageable costs the business can sustain.
Right Product is a way to aim for building something fits a good Market, fills a hole in the universe, and supports the business through creating something desirable, feasible, and viable.

• Desirable products solve an unmet need in a way that works for the User and creates the value that a Customer is willing to pay for.

• Feasible products can be reliably delivered with high quality by the organization, within the constraints of available resources and in time to meet the Market demands.

• Viable products have value for a sufficiently large base of Customers willing to pay, so a business thrives.

Value is how the Customer decides the Product is “worth it.” Does buying the Product improve the life of the Customer enough to justify the price? Get it right and they tell friends; get it wrong and they also tell friends.

Growing a business demands healthy margins; these are the result of a price that creates satisfying Customer value with costs that are well-managed to deliver the Right Product.

• Price is what the Customer pays for a Product, and is set and controlled by the business. Price is also a story; it shapes how customers perceive value, fits with their identity, and signals who the product is meant for. Pricing set too low leaves money on the table or targets the wrong user, while setting it too high leaves customers feeling like they got a bad deal.

• Cost is what the business spends to deliver a Product. Costs are managed through choices the Product team makes during development and path to market. Creating customer value has a cost, and though choices are made on where to allocate and reduce it, it’s never fully controlled because there are always extrinsic factors that impact it. Cut costs too much and your product feels cheap, don’t cut enough and survival is a struggle.

• Margin is Price minus Cost; it’s what the business makes by selling a Product. Note that it’s a residual. Margin applied across all the Products sold is what funds the business, covering the people, the overhead, innovation, and ultimately profitability.

Who a Product is for and why it’s a good value determines price. Only from here can the Right Product and its subsequent costs and tradeoffs get defined. Conversely, starting from the product you want to build locks in costs, and then trying to figure out price as an afterthought is a recipe for margins that don’t pencil out.

When the Market responds with growth momentum, this is the signal of Product-Market-Fit (PMF), the true validation of the Right Product. It rarely happens with the first version, but rather from cycles of feedback from the Market and iterative improvements. Before the Market response, it’s unknowable whether the product hit the mark - so this is where teams can apply rigor in research, strategy, planning, and execution to ensure efforts are aimed as close to the Right Product as possible, minimizing wasted resources and maximizing chances of success.

Plan accordingly: start simple, move fast, learn lots.

Originally published on productbriefly.com

Got Product?

Use this brief to get your team started with Product thinking. Challenge assumptions about Right Product. Find the pieces you could ship sooner to start finding your way to Product Market Fit. Untangle which Product roles might be muddled.

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Next moves

This brief is on productbriefly.com linked to related briefs and suggested additional reading. To quickly use with your team as an email or calendar attachment, there’s a pdf version for you, and also a read-only Google Doc if you want to iterate on it. There’s also subscriber chat if you want to discuss the nuances or need some help.

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The student up front was a bit confused at the question. We all were.

Professor Brown spoke to everyone in the room, with a note of surprise in his voice. “Wait… nobody told you this yet? How did you all make it this far? OK, I’ll explain:
Every problem has at least five ways you can solve it.
One way is the hardest and has the most steps, highest likelihood of an error, and takes the longest.
By contrast, one way is the easiest, with the fewest steps, making it both the fastest and least error-prone.
Before jumping into the first solution that comes to mind, think of two more; with three possible solutions, you stand a chance of ruling out the awful one and potentially stumbling into the elegant one.
Think of three different ways to solve a problem before starting your work.”

My worldview updated, right then. Like someone hit the refresh button.

There’s more than one way to skin a banana; there’s an easy way and a hard way. Hearing this spelled out so elegantly and practically, though, made it simple to change my approach to every problem.

Unexplored alternatives might have been the silver bullet when faced with an urgent problem. Fast decision making and pressure to deliver results need not compromise our best work.
Rapidly vetting three solutions gives people the chance to avoid disasters, discover elegance, and build confidence.

The brief below anchors a conversation I’ve had countless times over more than a decade with colleagues and friends alike. Use it with folks that need the reminder that elegant fast solutions come from taking a beat for some forethought.

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Choose solutions

The first solution that comes to mind is rarely your best one.

Picture yourself taking a difficult math test, the final exam. You studied, you’re prepared.
Seated at a desk, you look over the test. It’s long: lots of problems, and they’re complicated but feel like they’re in your wheelhouse.
You dig in. At first, things feel obvious, you breeze through the first twenty minutes, checking work as you go. Things get tougher, and you skip past a couple to find and take care of the remaining easy wins.

Now, all that’s left are the tough ones, and there’s half an hour on the clock. You look at each one, think of a way to solve it, and race to finish. Some solutions are short, clean, and clear with only a few steps. Others are long, with each step compounding any mistakes. As you check work, you notice the longer ones contain a rounding error or some other issue, and go back and make fixes.
With a couple minutes to spare, you hand it in.

Rewind. You’re starting the hard problems.
One by one, you quickly think of three different ways to solve, choose the easiest, and chase it down. Now they’re all simple, fewer steps, easier to check, less room for error. More elegant.
With ten minutes to spare, you have a chance to give everything another once-over, and hand it in.

Choice needs options

What if all your solutions were the worst possible approach?
Unless you considered another option, you have no way of knowing.
Nobody comes up with the best, most elegant solution on the first try every time.

Over, under, around, and through: these are the ways to get past an obstacle. If you have a shovel, you don’t always have to dig - you might be able to use it as a lever, or stick it in the ground to get some height and jump over. Your tool is not the shovel, your tool is creativity in ways to use the shovel to get past the obstacle.

Don’t we want to be choosing solutions? To have a choice requires things to choose from. Nobody comes up with the best, most elegant solution on the first try every time, and often not on the second - definitely not me and almost certainly not you. Yet how often do we unthinkingly surrender to the tension to just jump into our first idea?

Getting good at solving problems is about learning how to look for the easy way.

Reacting or responding?

Teams get crunched to move fast, leading to hasty solutions without choices; when faced with a problem under pressure, one solution sounds promising, and we move on it. It’s natural. In reactive mode, formulating two other options feels like time wasted until we miss the mark and have to start over.

Respond to the challenge: pause, zoom out, zoom in.
Give yourself choices, and solve things better faster.

• Backwards. What are the five most recent problems you’ve had to solve, and what options did you consider for each? You’ll quickly get a sense of how often you’re actually exploring options.

• Forwards. Next time you’re vetting a solution, ask what two others were considered.

• Loops. How can you get in the habit of very rapidly thinking of three solutions before choosing one? How can this work on an individual level, a team level, and an organizational level?

One problem. Five solutions.
Think of three, pick one, move forward. Do it fast.

Originally published on productbriefly.com

Making choices

How does one build the habit loop that provides better paths to choose?
Likewise, how do we create a team environment dynamic where this feels like it makes us quicker, rather than slower?

When we’re pressed for time, this all needs to move fast in order to move faster.

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Welcome. Product, Briefly is a collection of one-page briefs about building products and the people who create them, drawn from two decades of work in new ventures spanning a breadth of industries. Each one can be read in five minutes and discussed for an hour. They cover cover different facets of Product work while also serving as examples of the form.

It’s built to be taken apart: use what fits straight away, draw inspiration from the collection, make the rest your own. Take a brief, or make a brief.

Language unifies teams

Product development is interdisciplinary, with teams spanning design, engineering, marketing, and more. As AI and new technologies add complexity, the cost of miscommunication between experts grows exponentially. Teams that develop a shared language move faster, build better products, and create more value - while those who don't waste time and resources talking past each other.

Selling in the language of your Customer was an early lesson for me in Sales and for marketing. Seemed obvious: tell your customer what’s on offer and negotiate in their own terms. Using your own internal language just confuses a Customer, things get lost in translation, and the deal doesn’t happen.

The revelation on actively building internal team language happened when I was Product Manager at a company that was overtly “experience-led.” There, the entire organization had adopted this way of speaking about everything surrounding the Product - from how it’s defined, to how tradeoffs are made, to how it’s sold and supported - in the language of Customer Experience.

This wasn’t actually pushing groupthink or enforcing uniform terminology.
Instead, it was about creating shared understanding that let experts communicate their deep knowledge effectively across disciplines. Engineers could advocate for technical decisions through the lens of experience, while designers could articulate their choices in terms of concrete customer value.
This pattern of building shared language became a key of creatig high-performing teams everywhere I worked afterward.

Share language

“You can’t really communicate unless everyone knows what the nomenclature is”

~ Neil deGrasse Tyson

Unify experts

Experts inside of a field have their own shared language, shorthand for concepts that are complex and nuanced, ways of describing their shared perspectives of what they see and how the world works.

Product teams are interdisciplinary, bringing together diverse experts; but how can teammates bridge their nuanced expertise across those domain boundaries to work effectively together?

Done poorly, there’s lots of eye-rolling as people talk past each other: Designers get frustrated because Engineers can’t see past what’s functional, Engineers get stuck on performance metrics that Marketers don’t think has any customer value, etc. Translation errors can be expensive.

Done well, Engineers agree with Designers about ways to elevate the experience, and Marketers and Engineers collaborate to prioritize performance that helps a product stand above its competition.

Language is thinking

Communication on the best teams is seamless: no gaps, no room for misunderstanding, no dumbing down. This is how to make the most of a team’s collective intelligence. Product story, aesthetic considerations, and technical trade-offs all become things the team can think together on, debate, and resolve because it’s all within their shared understanding. If you’re a Product person spending time acting as a translation layer between different disciplines, then they are not speaking the same language.

Each product has its own language, and everyone on the team will learn and contribute to advancing it. This is sometimes established at the company-level, or absent that, can be done at the team-level. Typically, it’s rooted in how people will buy and use the product. However, the team defines the language, not the Customer.

Product language typically draws from three sources: the User, the Customer, and the Ecosystem; in some cases, such as a consumer product, User language alone might be enough.

• User-driven. Start with an actual human who has to interact with your product - in the case of consumer products like B2C web or Consumer Electronics, this is the end User; for something like Industrial products this might be an Installer, for instance. Detailed descriptions of User Experiences, beyond Agile Stories or Jobs to be Done, are great here. How does this fit into their life? What is the person thinking/feeling/doing before/during/after using the Product?

• Customer-driven. If you’re in a B2B or industrial Product, or operate in a Sales-driven company, you might be focusing on Features and Value - which can be a good thing. There’s still a human on the other end that needs to work with it, so best to consider Users as well.

• Ecosystem-driven. Mature industries and highly competitive sectors will have their own language, and often this is the default for teams building for them. How will you talk about it on the press tour? This is the Ecosystem language.

Evolve your dialect

• Where is translation most frequently needed? What experts are talking past each other?

• When do people from different disciplines use the same terms? Use these building blocks.

• How do people outside of the team talk about the Product, from Executives to Support?

Originally published on productbriefly.com

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Talk together now

If your team is wasting time translating or there’s miscommunication happening, use this brief to start changing the conversation.

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