Category
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.
- ·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.
- ·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.
- ·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.
- ·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.
- ·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.
- ·3 min read
Risk Reduction: The Vocabulary I Use Under Pressure
Most teams don't lack judgment, they lack a shared vocabulary for talking about risk before it becomes an incident. These are the six tools I actually reach for when a decision needs to be fast, reversible where it can be, and scrutinized where it can't.
- ·3 min read
Turning Strategy Into a Shippable Sequence
The roadmap and backlog layers are where every strategy either becomes real or quietly dies in a spreadsheet. Here's what I've actually learned running RICE, Cost of Delay, WSJF, and Scrum vs. Kanban vs. Shape Up against real backlogs — including where each one lied to me.
- ·3 min read
Discovery Frameworks That Actually Change What You Build
Objectives and roadmaps are only as good as the discovery underneath them — and most discovery I've watched happen is just feature requests wearing a lab coat. Here's the set of frameworks that actually separates a real customer problem from someone's opinion, the gate that decides whether a validated problem is worth building for, and where each one still fooled me before it earned its keep.
- ·3 min read
Strategy Formation: How to Tell a Real Strategy From a Wish
Most documents labeled 'strategy' are actually goals wearing a strategy's clothes. Here's the kernel test I run to catch that, plus the three other frameworks I reach for once diagnosis alone isn't enough — Playing to Win, Wardley Mapping, and 7 Powers.