Product Management

The job is to decide what to build, convince people it's right, and make sure it ships and works. Everything else — frameworks, rituals, artefacts — is in service of those three things, and is worth keeping only as long as it is.

Strategy before backlog

A roadmap is downstream of a position: who you are for, what you do better than the alternatives, and how you get paid for it. Teams without that position end up arbitrating feature requests by volume, which reliably produces a product that is adequate for everyone and essential to nobody.

Discovery that changes decisions

• Research is only worth running if a plausible result would change what you build. If it wouldn't, skip it and ship.
• Talk to the users who churned, not just the ones who stayed. The stayers can't tell you what's broken.
• Instrumented behaviour beats stated preference, especially on anything involving money.
• Prototype the risky assumption, not the easy one.

Teams that own outcomes

The structural decision that matters most is what a team is accountable for. Teams given a metric and the latitude to move it behave completely differently from teams given a list. The former argue about whether a feature will work; the latter argue about when it will be done.

• Give each team one primary metric it can genuinely influence, and a guardrail it must not break.
• Keep the path from idea to production short enough that shipping is cheaper than debating.
• Write decisions down with the reasoning, so they can be revisited when the reasoning changes rather than relitigated on vibes.
• Kill things publicly and without drama, so that stopping stays cheap.

How I work on this

I was executive Head of Product at YNAB, running strategy across eight teams, and Head of Product Management at Tempo, where I built and scaled an international PM team through an acquisition. Earlier I led airline scheduling products at Kronos and was CTO and Head of Product at Agendize, scaling that organisation to twenty people. The through-line is teams accountable for a commercial number rather than a delivery date.

Work with me on this

Ingi Brown advises on product management and related work. Email ingi@ingibrown.com or see the full background.

Related

• B2C Monetization

  Turning consumer audiences into recurring revenue: offer design, paywall placement, trial mechanics and the analytics to prove what worked.

• Pricing & Revenue Strategy

  Pricing, packaging and plan architecture for subscription businesses — plus the experiment design and revenue modelling to back the decisions.

• Innovation Management

  Running new-bet portfolios inside companies that already have a core business to protect — funding, governance, stage gates and knowing when to stop.