Notes from my Product Reading

I’m a slow reader.

And then I usually take notes on what I read.

And then I analyze and summarize and consolidatize said notes.

All this extends the reading process, of which I’ve been doing more since I’m not commuting. Thanks Obama Coronavirus. Sometimes, they result in a picture – I hope to share a few of those with you one day. Sometimes, they result in a bulleted list – I will share one with you now, from my reading of Product-related articles.

WARNING: these are not fleshed out ideas – these are bullet points – these are high-level – these are my notes, in a form I can understand, sitting in a list in my Reminders app on my iPhone 8.

Behold my 14 points.

You’re welcome.


  • Purpose: improve people’s lives
    • human-centric
  • Fall in love with the human problem, not the biz solution
  • JTBD: accomplish a life need
    • original human root need
  • Impact map (goal, actor, impact, deliverable): outcome instead of output
    • outcome: observable & measurable
    • outcome: marketed based on JTBD
  • WHAT IS THE OUTCOME??
    • driving question
  • Mission: get from Leadership, or set & get buy-in
  • Lead by aspiration: positive vision
    • reduce Cost of Fear
  • Experiment! MVP!
    • reduce Cost of Fear
    • fastest, smallest, simplest thing towards validated learning about customers
  • Continuous Delivery, so can do Continuous Design
    • reduce Cost Of Fear
  • Continuous Research, so do user feedback
    • feeds a themed roadmap
    • can uncover missing themes!
  • Theme: solve a specific problem
  • Roadmap: lightweight & transparent & themes & time horizons
    • answer the following: What? Why? OKR link? Will change with new data
  • 4 roadmap / backlog item categories
    • metrics movers (short-term)
    • under-the-hoods (inner quality)
    • user needs (outer quality)
    • strategic / innovated (long-term)
  • make something people want to talk about: purple cow