Product Management Digest 9 - Teardown

2014 Jun 02, by David Kim



PM Reading Digest - Teardown Edition

Your weekly product management reading. Not too much, not too little, just right.

Last Thursday, some of us met in person for a product teardown workshop comparing Flickr and Carousel mobile apps (see unannotated slidedeck). As was the case with Hotel Tonight vs. Airbnb, we broke up into small groups and took a comparative look at these apps along a few key dimensions.

The key goal was to get into the minds of the product teams, to understand the rationale behind the decisions they made. This is an exercise that PMs and product teams actually do regularly. It's a great team learning tool. Other benefits of the exercise are:

  1. Practice product sense, and sharpen product intuition
  2. Stay current on product practices and discover features
  3. Learn to articulate product decisions

For a more detailed summary of the analysis dimensions and context for analysis, see our FREE Product Teardown Guide.

I wanted to explore these themes further in this week's reading. And if you want to learn about these in the context of enterprise products, check out Mihir's upcoming talk at Tradeshift.

Want to work on a PM Fast Track project or become an organizer? Email: productloverssf@gmail.com.


The Art of Decision Making as a Product Manager

Sachin Rekhi

“Product managers have to make many decisions every day, including product prioritization decisions, product design decisions, bug triage decisions, and many more. And the process by which a product manager makes such decisions can result either in an extremely well functioning team dynamic or… quite the opposite.” Read more.


On being right and on Product Sense

Shreyas Doshi

“Especially for web products, the gains from always being right are almost always eclipsed by the losses resulting from your sluggishness.” Read more.


Product Focused vs. Customer Focused Product Management

Kate Leto

“In my mind, a Product Focused organization is one that has a roadmap and even vision for the product based on delivering something that the team believes will meet market demand – whatever the market may be. I think of iPad and Apple as a classic example.” Read more.


Does your product suck? Stop adding new features and “zoom in” instead

Andrew Chen

“The question is, how do you pick the feature you’re going to zoom into? And how do you validate that it can work as a standalone product? And how do you execute the pivot itself and what metrics can you look at?” Read more.

The Fifth Discipline

It occurred to me that the tear down exercise was a collaborative, group learning. In this day and age, this is so important in order to stay relevant and competitive. While that's a separate digest topic, I thought I would share a title that may be of interest to the community. If you have read it, please share your comments on PM Fast Track site.

Senge writes:

I believe that the prevailing system of management is, at its core, dedicated to mediocrity. It forces people to work harder and harder to compensat for failing to tap the spirit and collective intelligence that characterizes working together at their best.

The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization

Team learning is vital because teams, not individuals, are the fundamental learning unit in modern organizations.

The Fifth Discipline


What are you reading? Please share it with the community.

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