"I don't like when people say that the product manager is the CEO of the product. To me, it's more like the quarterback. The quarterback sometimes has to call the plays himself, but also will take plays from the offensive coordinator or the head coach on the sidelines, right?" That's from my friend Dan Lack, who has been a CEO and a VP PM. We can go further: Quarterbacks are in charge on the field, but they operate within the overall team strategy developed by the owner and the head coach. 

Do you like this analogy? 

David Cancel, CEO of Drift, hates roadmaps. He says, "Either I'm going to disappoint you by giving you exactly what we thought six months ahead of time was the best solution when it's not, or by changing course and having lied to you."

I’m a big believer in the Minimum Viable Product concept. Lots of people misunderstand it. MVP is not "What's the least we can get away with?" or "The crappiest-version that we can possibly put out."

Instead, MVP is "What is the smallest amount of work that we can do to validate a hypothesis and verify our assumptions about our business plan."...

I make it a policy never to act on a customer request without making sure I understand why they want it. What problem are they trying to solve? What value do they expect to derive from this change or addition (or subtraction)?

Sometimes you find, if you understand the few underlying problems, you can come up with a single solution that solves the needs of many customers at once....

When Product Managers present a roadmap, people often conclude that it is an absolute commitment. For some reason they assume that the learning process stops when the roadmap begins. Weird but true. I've seen this again and again in multiple companies.

This week I've been thinking about the differences between product and project management. Friends? Enemies? Frenemies? I've just written a 10-page report for O'Reilly on the subject, but here's one key point:

This week I'm thinking about how McKinsey's findings on the obstacles to digital transformation apply to product. Here's the money quote: