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Standardization will look different at every company, depending on your needs, but there are some core areas we all need to standardize, like idea management, roadmapping, product tool kits, and onboarding. And of course, none of this actually replaces the need for skilled product managers. These processes can only help you if the quality of the inputs is good.

Product Operations

Melissa Perri and Denise Tilles

Don’t Jump Straight to Your Conclusions When preparing for a meeting with stakeholders, we tend to focus on our conclusions—our roadmap, our release plan, our prioritized backlog. More often than not, this is exactly what our stakeholders are asking us to share. Even in companies that espouse a focus on outcomes, we still tend to spend most of our time talking about outputs. The challenge with this approach is that our stakeholders often have their own conclusions. It’s easy to have an opinion about outputs. We all have our own preferences about how a product or service should work. When we anchor the conversation in the solution space, we encourage our stakeholders to share their own preferences. However, these preferences aren’t always grounded in good discovery. After all, it’s our job to do discovery, not our stakeholders’.

Continuous Discovery Habits

Teresa Torres

That’s the old way. And it is bonkers. Doing things the old way, it can take six months or more to develop a strategy. The old way is like assembling IKEA furniture by tossing parts, an Allen wrench, and a dozen squirrels into a broom closet, then hoping for the best.

Click

Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky

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