The reading list
Essays, tech notes, and the in-between.
- Product·3 min read
The One-Year Innovation Plan: Rocks, Metered Money, and a Kill Cadence
Annual planning is where corporate innovation goes to die — twelve months of projected outcomes for work whose defining property is that outcomes can't be projected. Traction's answer is to plan the year as a small set of quarterly rocks; the innovation literature's answer is to fund assumptions, not roadmaps. Put together, they make a one-year innovation plan that survives contact with reality: fewer commitments, metered money, a weekly scorecard that counts learning, and a standing appointment to kill things.
- Product·3 min read
Presenting the Roadmap to Investors: Milestones, Not Features
Investors don't fund feature lists — they fund risk retirement. The roadmap slide that works in a pitch is three milestones, each converting this round's money into next round's proof. Here's how to derive that slide from your real roadmap, survive the hostile questions, and avoid handing your board a stick.
- Product·3 min read
How to Run an Innovation Lab: Build a School, Not a Showroom
Most innovation labs are showrooms — beanbags, a wall of Post-its, a shutdown announcement three years later. The ones that work are schools: places where people deliberately practice the craft of taking an idea from hunch to evidence, inside a structure the parent company can actually absorb. Here's the hands-on version — the pedagogy, the operating cadence, the governance, and the stories from Skunk Works to Kickbox worth stealing from.
- Product·3 min read
Building a Roadmap You Can Defend with Now/Next/Later
Most roadmaps are delivery contracts wearing a strategy costume — a Gantt chart of guesses that becomes a stick to beat the team with by Q3. Here's the hands-on version: what actually feeds a roadmap, how to write an item that survives contact with reality, and why one roadmap has to serve three very different rooms.
- Product·3 min read
Working Backwards: The PR/FAQ and the Discipline of Narrative
Amazon's PR/FAQ gets described as 'write the press release first,' which makes it sound like a writing exercise. It isn't — it's a forcing function that makes you discover, before anyone builds anything, whether the finished thing would matter to anyone. Here's how it works, why the FAQ is the real document, and where the six-pager and SCQA fit around it.
- Product·3 min read
User Story Mapping: Fixing the Flat Backlog
A prioritized backlog is still a flat list, and flat lists lose the one thing that matters most: the shape of the user's actual journey. Here's Jeff Patton's story map, the slicing discipline that makes it work, and the INVEST and SPIDR tools that keep the stories underneath it honest.
- Product·3 min read
North Star Metrics and Metric Trees: One Number Is Never Enough
A North Star metric without a tree underneath it is a scoreboard nobody can act on; a tree without guardrails is an invitation to win the number and lose the product. Here's how I actually build the metric layer — North Star criteria, input decomposition, counter-metrics, and where HEART and the pirate funnel still fit.
- Product·3 min read
Positioning: The Choice You Make Before the Market Does
Every product is positioned, whether you chose the position or not — customers will file you next to something, and if you didn't pick the shelf, they will. Here's April Dunford's framework for picking it deliberately, plus the older tools it quietly replaced and the one question that tells you your positioning is broken.
- Product·3 min read
Principle-First: When to Put the Frameworks Down
After six posts of frameworks, here's the uncomfortable conclusion: the best product people I've worked with use fewer frameworks every year, not more. The frameworks were never the point — they're scaffolding for principles, and the goal is to reach the point where the scaffolding comes down.
- Product·3 min read
Org Design & Measurement: Closing the Strategy Loop
The layer that decides whether a strategy has any teeth at all isn't the roadmap, it's who owns what and whether the numbers you're tracking mean anything. This is the last framework post in the series, and the one where the cascade stops being a diagram and starts being an org chart.