(This is a living document that I'll keep updating throughout my product journey. All opinions are mine and are not meant to convey THE truth of doing product, rather serve as a document I can review on regular basis to remind myself of things that are important for me. Enjoy it in its current form!)
- You are what you repeat
- Create where you are
- To paraphrase Sam Altman, don't try to fight the product equivalent of the laws of physics. Even more importantly, don't forget they exist.
- It's important to know when to discuss a given topic with different groups. Bring a very ambiguous topic to a larger team too early - and all you will likely get are empty discussions, chaos and confusion. Bringing it too late is very risky, too, because you might assume that something is feasible when it's not (or the other way round). Or the team actually makes some great points about the customer experience that you missed. Or they have a much better idea how to solve something than you do. As a rule of thumb, it's good to test and explore an idea with your "product trio" and stakeholders/clients through a couple of iterations before it's brought to the entire team.
- Speak more succintly, explain yourself less, do more.
- You can always get 1% closer to your extremely ambitious and scary goal. What's your today's 1%?
- Write product briefs. Then share them with product trio. Then share them with the team.
- Inspiration comes from everywhere and everyone and can hit you in the moment you least expect it to.
- Learn to capture inspiration and ideas IMMEDIATELY after they come to your mind. Keep your notes app at hand and make a habit of writing down your thoughts as they come - they'll be life saving later. Paste things in Miro. Record them on your smart watch. However you can do it in a given moment - make sure to capture it.
- When bringing topic to someone (or some group) for the first time, aim for simplicity. Remove 50% of sections from the product brief, 50% of goals, 50% of information, 50% of whatever it is you bring with yourself. Too much information at once will make it hard to convey your message and will distract people.
- If you're full time into product management, at the very best you're going to be a mediocre engineer (or engineering manager), so don't stick with something that is more familiar and that feels more comfortable to you, step up, get more comfortable with ambiguity and focus on the efforts where you can make the biggest difference, what no one else has time for and what is, at the end of the day, truly the essence your job - that are things like customer discovery and problem definition. There are a lot of people in the team that look into technical challenges, there is no one that looks into roadmap, marketing, market, assumption testing etc. Focus on what's your job for the biggest ROI on the time you spend at work.
- To quote Steve Jobs, the doers are the major thinkers - the people that create a major change in the industry are both thinking and doing (which, in the context of IT, means building software). Steve Jobs was not a programmer, a designer nor an engineer himself, but he knew how to "translate into business" the potential and the creativity of ideas coming from the "thinkers-doers" crowd.
- It's important to learn how to make yourself do the hard things. It seems that it's even more important to teach yourself to stop doing things you feel tempted to do / do on autopilot.
- Just like getting serious returns on your investments takes time, getting serious returns on your learning and experience takes time. You need a strategy for both - a strategy that doesn't change every week, a strategy that can help you gain against "market" volatility, that suits your personality and that will help you benefit from compound interest over time.
- Focus. During. Meetings. Fidget toys help.
- Prepare. For. Meetings. Notion / Miro help.
- Not everything is about you. In fact, very few things are about you.
- A cliche, but keep reminding yourself that being busy is not the same as doing meaningful work.
- You'll be surprised how much you can learn about that topic that scares you in 2 hours. You won't believe how much you can learn about it in 2 days. But then, remember that you're far from being an expert on it and there's a whole universe of things you don't know you don't know.
- Consistency > crunch mode, but know when the latter is necessary.
- There are a lot of things that are not your (or your team's) fault, but are your responsibility. There's a huge value in recognising that and in pushing for whatever it is that needs to be done. Sometimes your goal is to make it happen - whatever is truly very important for your team and your product, even if it means going beyond the scope of what you and your team is usually responsible for.
- Shit happens and will happen, it's all about how you respond to it.
- You need to have a clear, available, up-to-date roadmap of items that are happening now, next and later and that link back to the product and company strategy. You should be able to recite it even if someone throws a bucket of ice-cold water in your face at 3am.
- Everything you do must be for a very clear reason and have very clear value proposition. At any point you need to be able to answer the question "why do we do it and what impact do we think this will make?".
- You need to talk with or at least hear from your customers often (ideally, at least once a week) - both to spot new opportunities and to reality-test the assumptions you think are true (which implies that your roadmap items should have these assumptions defined).
- You need to have a way to do a daily temperature check on your KPIs and important metrics (which implies you need to have them in the first place).
- A huge part of your job is and will always be storytelling (which implies there is a valuable, customer-data-backed and not completely made-up story to tell in the first place).
- If you ignore product marketing, most of your teams' efforts probably won't make much impact.
- I'm using Todoist to capture all tasks I can think of, at the very moment they come into existence: stuff I promised anyone I'm going to do for them, things I need to spend my focus time on, my to-do for the day etc. Chrome add-on helps with that a ton.
- Toggl helps me track time spent on things that matter to me as well as keep my focus on I single task. I usually name a task that I'm about to pick up, start the timer and stop it when I'm done. Added benefit: you'll be surprised how many tasks you hate and keep thinking about for hours (or days!) you can complete in less than 5 mins (and therefore make them less scary).
- Whenever I'm about to start exploring a new topic or problem, I create a Miro board to serve me as a "moodboard". Then, while I try to learn more about it, I'm dumping EVERYTHING that can help me steer the discovery and solutioning later - interesting related products I've seen, YouTube videos, screenshots, blog articles, random thoughts, Slack messages etc. The point is to broaden my view on the problem/opportunity and in the end, get to a better solution.
- I have a special page in Notion called "Meetings" which I use to prepare for meetings ahead of time, take notes during meetings and be able to glance through notes I made previously whenever I'm about to meet with this person again. It's proven to be a life saver many times already.
- ChatGPT helps me to learn various things really quickly - and I'm really happy to have a companion whom I can ask stupidly simple questions (think about the "I don't know what X is and it this point I'm too afraid to ask" meme - well, I'm definitely not afraid to ask ChatGPT)
- I'm fangirling Jira Product Discovery. Seriously, it's awesome.
What do you think of my product philosophy? What's yours? Send me a 
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