069
Discovery & Validation
11 min read
A Practical Guide to User Archetypes
Build evidence-backed user archetypes that expose meaningful behavioural differences, improve product trade-offs, and stay useful after the workshop.
The journal
Product notes for people who build.
Practical essays on product strategy, discovery, development, technology, and the work of turning ideas into useful products.
068
Leadership & Organisation
11 min read
Team Alignment: Make Local Decisions Coherent
Build team alignment as an operating frame for coherent local decisions: set boundaries, expose drift, preserve context, and repair contradictions early.
067
AI & Technical Product
12 min read
Personalisation Engines: Define the Decision Before the Model
Treat personalisation as a decision policy: define eligibility, choices, outcomes, and how the product behaves when evidence is weak.
066
Leadership & Organisation
12 min read
Decision Frameworks for Product Leaders: Make Conflict Decidable
A practical protocol for contested product decisions: define authority, surface disagreement, test decisive evidence, commit, and know when to reopen the call.
065
Design & Delivery
11 min read
Release Management: Control Exposure, Preserve Options
Manage releases as controlled product exposure: define readiness, stage access, set stop conditions, read mixed evidence, and turn each launch into learning.
064
Measurement & Growth
13 min read
Retention Metrics: Measure the Return to Value
Define retention around repeat value, eligible opportunity, and product cadence—then separate behaviour, subscription, revenue, and reactivation.
063
Product Strategy
11 min read
Product-Market Fit Is a Relationship, Not a Milestone
Assess product-market fit by segment and use case, combine behavioural and commercial evidence, and decide whether to discover, strengthen, or scale.
062
Leadership & Organisation
12 min read
Team Engagement: Diagnose the Work Before Motivating People
Use team-engagement signals to find where product work has lost meaning, agency, feedback, or capacity—and repair the work rather than chase a pulse score.
061
Product Strategy
12 min read
Pricing Frameworks: Design the Value Exchange
Design pricing as a product contract across buyer, value metric, package, price function, evidence, and migration—not as a number copied from competitors.
060
Measurement & Growth
13 min read
Experiment Tracking: Reconstruct Every Result and Decision
Build a durable experiment record across versions, eligibility, assignment, exposure, telemetry health, analysis lineage, decisions, follow-up and privacy.
059
Leadership & Organisation
10 min read
Startup Velocity: Shorten the Path from Decision to Evidence
Measure startup velocity from a consequential question to evidence that changes the next decision, then remove waits, oversized batches, and recovery risk.
058
AI & Technical Product
13 min read
Practical AI Governance: Build a Decision and Evidence System
Govern AI across its lifecycle with clear decision rights, scoped use, evidence, release gates, supplier controls, incident response, and retirement.
057
Design & Delivery
11 min read
Inclusive Design: Make Exclusion a Product Decision
Make exclusion an explicit product decision: define who is blocked, combine accessibility standards with lived evidence, resolve trade-offs, and own exceptions.
056
Measurement & Growth
10 min read
Growth Loops for Early-Stage Products: Close One Cycle Before Scaling It
Map a growth loop from user value to the next qualified opportunity. Test its weakest edge, delay, saturation, and guardrails before adding infrastructure.
055
Discovery & Validation
12 min read
Opportunity Sizing: Worked Example and Template
Size a product opportunity with a worked example and free Excel template. Compare reach, problem incidence, capture, and value using explicit assumptions.
054
Discovery & Validation
12 min read
User Feedback Loops: Close the Decision, Not the Ticket
Build feedback loops that preserve context, route risk, connect signals to decisions, respond without false promises, and verify the underlying problem.
053
Design & Delivery
12 min read
Kaizen for Product Teams: Improve the System, Not the Ritual
Use Kaizen to test changes to product work: define the problem, predict effects, detect displaced cost, and update the best-known method.
052
Leadership & Organisation
13 min read
Change Leadership: Design the Transition, Not the Announcement
Lead product change as a controlled transition: map affected work, assign decisions, protect continuity, learn from rollout evidence, and retire the old state.
051
Leadership & Organisation
12 min read
Mentorship Programs: Build the Learning Relationship
Design mentorship around a specific learning job, honest matching, explicit boundaries, safe rematching, and evidence that shows whether people are learning.
050
Measurement & Growth
11 min read
Cohort Tracking: Build Comparisons You Can Defend
Define cohort unit, anchor, eligibility, maturity, return event, interval, censoring, and composition before comparing retention over time.
049
Measurement & Growth
13 min read
Conversion Tracking: Build a Trustworthy Measurement Contract
Create conversion data product teams can trust by defining outcomes, event semantics, identity, validation, privacy, lineage, monitoring, and change control.
048
AI & Technical Product
11 min read
AI-Assisted Workflows: Design Work That Can Be Checked
Design AI-assisted work around a clear task, context contract, review burden, evidence trail, correction path, and accountable human decision.
047
Discovery & Validation
12 min read
User Interviews: Design Evidence You Can Challenge
Plan, conduct, and analyse user interviews as bounded evidence: connect the decision, sample, questions, observations, interpretation, and limitations.
046
AI & Technical Product
11 min read
NLP Product Workflows: From Model Output to Operable Capability
Choose, evaluate, and operate NLP or LLM capabilities inside a bounded workflow—with source provenance, human authority, monitoring, and rollback.