The reading list
Essays, tech notes, and the in-between.
- Product·3 min read
Practicing the Mom Test: The Same Interview, Twice
Reading The Mom Test takes two hours. Actually asking good questions under pressure takes practice nobody schedules. So here's the practice: one customer interview run twice — first the version that produced nothing but polite encouragement, then the rerun that killed the feature in twenty minutes — annotated line by line, with the drills I now use to train the reflex.
- Product·3 min read
The Issues List for Innovation: Surfacing Bad News at Line Speed
The V/TO ends with its humblest artifact — the issues list, a running inventory of everything wrong, unresolved, or unsaid, worked weekly through Identify-Discuss-Solve. For innovation it's the load-bearing page: new bets die of suppressed bad news, from the Challenger's normalized O-ring anomalies to every zombie project whose doubts never made it onto an agenda. Toyota's andon cord, Grove's revolving-door question, and Google's Project Aristotle are all versions of the same machine — one that makes bad news cheap to say and expensive to sit on.
- Product·3 min read
Rocks for Innovation: The Ninety-Day Experiment Contract
Rocks are the V/TO's smallest unit — three to seven quarterly priorities, each owned by one person, each simply on-track or off-track at the weekly meeting. The one-year plan post covered how rocks get funded; this one covers how they get written and run when the work is an experiment: the rock as a contract about evidence rather than delivery, why the binary status check beats status theater, what OKR grading gets right that rocks should steal, and Parkinson's law as the real argument for ninety days.
- Product·3 min read
Marketing Strategy for Innovation: Beachheads and The List
The V/TO's oddest section is a marketing strategy inside a vision document — a target-market List, three uniques, a proven process, a guarantee. For innovation it's the section that prevents the most expensive mistake there is: building for 'the market' instead of a named beachhead. Moore's chasm, Tesla's rich-people-first sequencing, Facebook's campus-by-campus rollout, and Superhuman's 40% test are all the same discipline — and Startup Genome's data says its absence is the leading cause of death.
- Product·3 min read
Core Focus for Innovation: The Hedgehog and the Product-Line Massacre
The V/TO's core focus — purpose plus niche — sounds like the least innovative section of the whole organizer: a fence around what you'll do. It's actually the section that makes innovation survivable, because unfocused companies innovate by accretion until the portfolio kills them. Apple's 1997 product massacre and LEGO's near-death diversification are the two best-documented cases of focus as a rescue operation — and both show that the fence is what makes the bets inside it affordable.
- Product·3 min read
Core Values for Innovation: The Permission Structure
The V/TO starts with core values, and innovation people roll their eyes — values are the poster in the lobby, the section everyone skips. Enron's poster said Integrity. But values are load-bearing for innovation in a way they aren't for operations: they're the permission structure that tells people what they're allowed to risk without asking. 3M's McKnight wrote the canonical one in 1948; Netflix and Amazon shipped theirs as operating documents. Here's how to write values that actually permit new bets.
- Product·3 min read
The Ten-Year Target: Long Bets and Institutional Patience
Traction's ten-year target is EOS's version of the BHAG — one dated, measurable destination the whole organization can recite. Companies mostly fail it in two opposite ways: no target at all, or a target without the institutional machinery to stay committed for a decade. AWS, Apple silicon, ASML's EUV, and the Prius show what patience wired into structure looks like; Kodak, Nokia's shelved prototypes, and the Concorde fallacy show the two ways decade-bets die — under-commitment and over-commitment.
- Product·3 min read
Marketing the Roadmap: Launch Tiers and Messaging
Most teams treat marketing as the thing that happens after shipping — a tweet, a changelog entry, silence. But marketing runs on the same roadmap engineering does, and the hands-on machinery is small: a positioning-to-messaging pipeline, three launch tiers, and a calendar derived from the Now column. Here's the whole system.
- Product·3 min read
The Three-Year Picture: An Innovation Portfolio You Can Steer
Traction's three-year picture is deliberately not a plan — it's a described destination, revisited yearly, that the one-year plan navigates toward. Applied to innovation, that's exactly what a portfolio of bets needs: a painted picture of the business you're becoming, a set of options priced accordingly, and the discipline to sequence them so each bet funds the next. IBM's EBO program, Tesla's four-line master plan, and Netflix's three-act pivot show what steerable looks like.
- Product·3 min read
The Roadmap in the Sales Room: Selling the Present
Every roadmap conversation with a prospect is a negotiation you didn't mean to enter. Here's the hands-on discipline: when the roadmap enters a deal, the three-tier answer to 'is X coming?', what a roadmap commitment actually costs, and how to turn prospect asks into discovery signal instead of backlog debt.