As it is quite literally the dog days of summer, this week’s post is the blog equivalent of a clip show. I’ve been writing this blog for 15 years (holy sh!t!). Over those years I’ve shared a variety of product management, design and leadership resources you, your teams and companies can use to work through many product development challenges. In this week’s blog post, I summarize as many of those resources as I could find with links to each relevant blog post. Let’s dig in. 

The Lean Product Canvas (nee The Lean UX Canvas)

By far the most popular and powerful tool we’ve created. This 8-step canvas helps you declare your assumptions about the work you’re doing, understand your customer, write testable hypotheses and design safe-to-fail experiments. 

Get the Lean Product Canvas

The Hypothesis Prioritization Canvas

A little sibling to the Lean Product Canvas, this tool helps teams determine which hypotheses to build right away, which ones to test and which ones to discard. 

Get the Hypothesis Prioritization Canvas

OKR Tracking Tools

If you’re not ready to spend on a SaaS OKR tracking tool and your homegrown tools are too complicated or inefficient, consider the options we’ve created here based in a Google sheet, Trello and a couple of other options as well. 

Get the OKR Tracking Tools (and also here)

7 Questions to Craft the Perfect Product Story

Products live or die based on the stories we tell each other, our stakeholders and our customers. Here’s a simple, 7-step process for ensuring your story gets its point across effectively. 

Get the 7 Questions to Craft the Perfect Product Story

Effective Storytelling: Bottom Line Up Front Explained

Speaking of storytelling, here’s a powerful, short technique for making sure the busiest people in the room and those with the shortest attention span understand what you’re talking about. 

Get the Bottom Line Up Front template

The Truth Curve

Another classic originally authored by Giff Constable and adapted by Josh Seiden and myself over the years, this chart gives teams a sense of when and how much to spend on the next iteration of their solution hypothesis. 

Get the Truth Curve

OKRs and User Story Mapping

Two great tools that work great together – OKRs and user story mapping are the Reese’s peanut butter cup of productivity and customer-centricity (apologies for the US-centric reference there). 

Get the scoop on making OKRs and User Story Mapping work together

How UX Design Integrates with Agile and Scrum

This is one of the most popular articles ever on the blog because it cuts directly to the core obstacles and solutions for making great user experience work with great Agile and Scrum practices. 

Get the details on making UX and Agile work

OKR AI Coach

I think I got all the buzzwords of the moment in on this tool. That said, this is what it says in the title – an AI chatbot that coaches you to writing great Objectives and Key Results. 

Get the AI OKR coach here (and let me know what you think)

How to Create an OKR-based Roadmap

This is a video-based tutorial on creating roadmaps that set outcomes (measures of human behavior) as the goal rather than the delivery of features. I walk you through every step. 

Get the tutorial on OKR-based roadmaps

12 Icebreakers to Kick Off Your Next Zoom Meeting

At the height of the pandemic our lives were 100% zoom. Today they are at least 50% Zoom if not more. This article shares 12 ways to positively engage and kick off a remote meeting. 

Get the 12 icebreakers for your next zoom meeting

What is an OKR? A basic guide

So much hype! So much confusion! So much bad implementation! Here’s a simple breakdown of what objectives and key results are and what makes them valuable when done well. 

Get the basic guide to OKRs

Ikigai – A Formula for Successful Agile Team Leadership

When I was writing Forever Employable I came across the Ikigai philosophy. I use it here as a tool to focus your leadership efforts to be more human, humane and impactful. 

Get the Ikigai team leadership tool 

Metrics Mountain – A Realistic Visualization of Any Customer Lifecycle Metrics

On a lengthy world tour teaching with Jeff Patton we discussed how the metaphor of the “funnel” is broken. Everything eventually passes through a funnel which renders that metaphor untrue when used to discuss metrics. Instead we determined that a mountain is a better way to visualize the metrics of a customer journey. We visualized it here.

Get the metrics mountain template