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Three helpful lines of questioning to strengthen your scope:
When someone decides to buy and read your book, what are they trying to achieve or accomplish with it?
Why are they bothering?
After finishing it, what’s different in their life, work, or worldview?
That’s your book’s promise.
What does your ideal reader already know and believe? If they already believe in the importance of your topic, then you can skip (or hugely reduce) the sections attempting to convince them of its worth. Or if they already know the basics, then you can skip those.
Who is your book not for and what is it not doing? If you aren’t clear on who you’re leaving out, then you’ll end up writing yourself into rabbit holes, wasting time on narrow topics that only a small subset of your readers actually care about. Deciding who it isn’t for will allow you to clip those tangential branches.
Write Useful Books
Rob Fitzpatrick und Adam Rosen
Other teams, however, put off doing the unglamorous work of removing their dependencies and instrumenting their systems. Instead, they focused too soon on the flashier work of developing new features, which enabled them to make some satisfying early progress. Their dependencies remained, however, and the continuing drag soon became apparent as the teams lost momentum.
Working Backwards
Colin Bryar and Bill Carr
This could be a mid-level product manager who really loves creating efficiencies and optimizing processes. They get excited about making the experience better for internal employees, which in turn makes better products for customers. A chief of staff who understands product development could also be a potential fit. Ideally, your process person has coached or mentored more junior team members, contributing to the establishment of best practices and rituals, and loves continuous improvement. Most of all, this type of operations person has a high emotional intelligence. They know how to navigate a changing business landscape and use influence to align various teams across a highly-matrixed organization. They’re also a resource to help coach team members in agile and lean methodologies, as they relate to product management. “Product Operations Manager” or “Product Operations Manager—Process” is an apt title for the job description.
Product Operations
Melissa Perri and Denise Tilles
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
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