Product Management

“(…) if you believe as I do that there is no one right way of doing product, then the very notion of standardizing a process across a large organization just means that you’ll be institutionalizing a process that will be a poor fit for most teams.” - Marty Cagan, Process People

“A good failure is when the value of the lesson is greater than the cost of the lesson. A bad failure is when the value of the lesson is much less than the cost of the lesson.” — Alberto Savoia, author of The Right It

“Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want.” - Jeff Bezos, 2016 Letter To Shareholders

“Speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk taking.” — Bias for Action, Amazon’s ninth leadership principle.

“As much as 50% of knowledge is lost in every handoff . That means that by the time work has had 4 handoffs, the recipient is potentially only getting 6% of the knowledge associated with the work. Move with the work, as a multi-disciplinary team, minimizing hand offs” — Jonathan Smart, Sooner Safer Happier

FIFO prioritization is almost never economically optimal in product development, because product development deals with high variability, nonrepetitive, nonhomogeneous flows. Different projects almost always have different delay costs, and they present different loads on our resources.

So, business strategy vs product strategy? They are the same thing. It makes no sense to think of them as different. Product is one tool in the box. It is one of the “how”s.