When working on vision with stakeholders, I like the Cover Story exercise, which I outlined last week. A great exercise to follow is is the Back-Plan.

A simple definition of innovation is creating something that did not exist before. A successful innovation, though, is where “it’s not just a little better, it's got to be 10x better. It's got to be ‘of course I want that instead of what I used before.’ Something that makes a customer 10x more powerful, 10x more badass.”

Outcome teams are a new breed of cross-functional powerhouses in tech, led by a product-oriented general manager. Product, engineering, U/X, Sales and Marketing report to the GM to ensure alignment. HubSpot, Wayfair, Toast, ShopFully, Salsify, and others are using this model to scale.

Roadmaps should be about customers and their problems. Unlike features and dates, which change a lot, a list of customer problems probably won’t change much between quarters. This gives you room to adjust and test features and keep looking for what works and what doesn’t in order to land on the best solution for customers.

A mission or vision statement explains the reason a company exists. The best focus is on what the customer can accomplish with the help of our product. Short and succinct wins. Example from Amazon: "Our mission is to continually raise the bar of the customer experience by using the internet and technology to help consumers find, discover and buy anything.”

Airbnb has just announced that all of its employees can remain remote forever, keeping their cushy San Francisco salaries even if they move to the boondocks. What do product people think of this? As a consultant who works from home in my slippers, it doesn't affect me direly. What is lost from a team when everyone is remote? Is in-person the solution? Hybrid? Or does remote give you the ability to recruit the distant talent you need? Tell me a story.

Nobody on your team is tasked with a crucial job? Product person, you are elected! In my product career, I have done partnership, UX, design, agile coaching, sales, etc. Lots of hats. I generally like the breadth of the product role. What's the oddest job you had to do as a product person?

The structure of OKRs is simple: You set a high-level inspiring goal like “Get real traction for our app.” This is your Objective. You then define three or so measures that will tell you if you have succeeded. “Traction” might be measured in terms of users, revenue, or conversion. These are your Key Results and they will depend on your particular company and your product.

The biggest study so far on meetings and productivity finds that most companies should eradicate them almost entirely.

“Prospects do sometimes ask for things in the contract, but we’ve never done it. We might learn things that would trump that request in importance. We sometimes lose deals based on customer asks we cannot guarantee, but we have lots of customers, and I need to do what’s best for most of them, not just a few of them.”

What’s your confidence that an item 12 months out on your roadmap will actually ship that month? How about 18 months? Less so, right? But some people assume that if they see it on a roadmap in a particular quarter it’s a commitment.

Oh, there are so many bad ways to prioritize! The CEO's gut, for instance. A very common way is to prioritize based on what will help close the deals in the pipeline this quarter. This is short-term thinking; it may help the numbers once or twice, but successful product people are focused on a market, rather than individual customers.

A roadmap presentation can leave stakeholders anxious. Sounds good, they are thinking, but can you deliver? Will it be as great as you say? Will it all ship on time?

Personas are a big, hairy, controversial topic. Many people swear by them; others think they are a waste of time and potentially quite misleading.

Consensus, in theory, means a group of people reaching a decision. In practice, it often means hours of discussion leading to decisions that everyone supposedly agrees to, but that no individual can be held accountable for (“I didn’t vote for that!”).

I really enjoyed the fireside chat “OKRs vs. Roadmaps Deathmatch” I did a few weeks back with my friend Janna Bastow, CEO of ProdPad. It can be a bloody fight! I have met lots of product people who are taken by one and hate the other

I received numerous messages about my Product Ops Nano a few weeks ago. For one, it "is about PM'ing the PM experience." Another sees it "encompasses everything from system configuration and admin, to process creation and audits, to training, to OKR management, to data collation and reporting."

Well-known Harvard Business Review blogger Deb Mills-Scofield distinguishes output from outcome well: “Let’s define outputs as the stuff we produce, be it physical or virtual, for a specific type of customer — say, car seats for babies. And let’s define outcomes as the difference our stuff makes — keeping your child safe in the car.” Her summary is the best way to keep these terms straight: “Outcomes are the difference made by the outputs.”

A Product Ops team can ease the burden of busy product managers by making research and product performance analysis easier. This centralized team acts as an enabler, providing tooling or even scheduling an ongoing series of customer interviews.

How do you convince customers to chat with you? At one company I worked at, customer interviews were as easy as asking. They were flattered I wanted their input. At another company, emails and voicemails went unanswered. My pitch was the same, but the customers were different. How do you recruit for key research if your customers and prospects don’t engage?