Category: Uncategorized

Why you should stop using product roadmaps and try GIST Planning

Post author By steve
Post date February 19, 2020

tl;dr version of https://medium.com/@itamargilad/why-i-stopped-using-product-roadmaps-and-switched-to-gist-planning-3b7f54e271d1

Over the years I created my fair share of product strategies, roadmaps and project gantts. I don’t do them anymore. I found a better alternative…

…This form of planning is a ton of work — just getting all stakeholders to agree is a massive undertaking, yet ROI is very low. The plans quickly go out of sync with reality — the longer they are the more they are wrong.

…[GIST] is a planning system that I started using while working at Google and further adapted over the years based on the principles of Lean Startup and Agile Development.

…Goals, Ideas, Step-projects, and Tasks. Each has a different planning horizon and frequency of change, and may use different tools to track, but together they constitute all the core planning any company and team needs to do.

Tags Frameworks, product, product management, roadmaps, strategy, tactics

Uncategorized

Why startups are hiring platform product managers.

Post author By steve
Post date February 18, 2020

tl;dr version of https://medium.com/hackernoon/platform-product-management-22e89c2f75c8

Product discovery is the hardest problem of true value creation and innovation. By extension, this means that the most important factor determining consistent growth for many startups is moving from a single customer product company to a platform company where shared components exist.

Hypergrowth startups are seeking new growth channels and encouraging experiments that would help them discover new products. The trumping idea here is that we are in growth over profit market, one that favors platform aggregators. And that gross profit margin will eventually improve as the startup achieves economies of scale while it grows and gains more revenue from different growth channels. A perfect example is Uber’s multi-sided platform strategy.

These type of experiments have created the need for platform product managers or vertical product leads, product managers that are capable of thinking outwards and making meaning of available data inwards.