Posts

Gatekeepers say no to everything. Proxies give a yes to every request. How do you find the right balance? The Problem With Saying No There are hundreds of articles online about how and why product managers should say no. In this context, negating refers to stakeholder requests that aim to change the scope of a product. In the short term, product managers get some breathing room by rejecting requests. A frequently encountered quote comes from Warren Buffett: Saying no to almost everything is a characteristic of successful people. This may apply to many professions. But also if your focus is on user-driven products? ...

Glad to have my article on Mind the Product where I attempt to explain why we have a bias toward increasing the scope of our products, even though evidence suggests that subtracting features can increase the overall value for users, customers and the business. https://www.mindtheproduct.com/the-irony-of-product-led-growth/

Software engineers don’t go to product managers to understand how to build a software application. But when engineers start sharing their knowledge about product, there is often something in those words. Especially when the authors have left a footprint in the tech industry. Joel Spolsky on the Worst Possible Strategic Mistake Joel Spolsky is one of the co-founders of Stack Overflow. Although he has hardly posted on “Joel on Software” for years, there are several timeless articles worth reading. One of them is “Things You Should Never Do, Part I” from 2000. It is about a specific strategic mistake in the tech industry and why the cause lies in the rule of thumb that code is harder to read than to write. ...

How writing declaratively improves team collaboration and ultimately the product. https://www.mindtheproduct.com/the-advantages-of-declarative-user-stories/

Headless CMS offer numerous advantages over traditional monolithic CMS, especially in a cloud-native stack. As is often the case, vendors’ product marketing only mentions the advantages. After two headless CMS projects, I have summarized the pitfalls to watch out for on HackerNoon: https://hackernoon.com/what-they-dont-tell-you-about-headless-cms

Sprints in Scrum need to be planned conscientiously. The personnel costs of an average sprint are easily in the five-digit range. Published on the Product Coalition, one of the largest product management communities: https://productcoalition.com/the-economics-of-sprint-planning-b20082d5e24e

How I built my previous portfolio website with Hugo static site generator and hosted it on GitHub. The nice thing about this setup is that there are no costs other than the domain. My site looks different now but the setup is identical: https://medium.com/the-kickstarter/how-to-create-a-product-portfolio-website-with-hugo-and-github-28daa950939c

The best practices I have acquired over time for setting up and managing a product backlog. Published on “Bootcamp”, a collection of resources and opinion pieces about UX, UI and product management on medium.com: https://medium.com/design-bootcamp/product-backlog-guidelines-and-best-practices-f52d1e12c1e5

Written before the GenAI boom with a focus on quantifying AI product development. Published on Outvise, one of the leading marketplaces for business tech experts present in more than 40 countries: https://blog.outvise.com/how-understand-and-measure-ai-products/

For many, mathematical statistics was a dry subject matter at school and university. Without reference to reality. Well, then AI/machine learning products came along and linear regression suddenly became fun: https://medium.com/swlh/8-algorithms-to-build-machine-learning-products-36695241682f