Hemnet Product Development book club - spring 2020

At Hemnet we have a product development book club where we read a book on a product development topic and meet weekly to discuss how the subject applies to our workplace. Everyone who is interest can join and propose a book and we take it from there. This forum was in place long before I joined and is one of my favorite moments of the week.

This spring we decided to tweak the format, instead of focusing on an entire book, we have been selecting different articles or video to talk about. It requires less time, gives more flexibility to the ones who can’t participate every week and at the same time allows us to cover different topics.

It is always really rewarding to hear all the different takes on a subject, depending on one’s experience and position. If you want to create a product culture in your organization this is definitely something I recommend you doing. And if you are looking for some inspiration to start, here is what we have been reading and discussing this spring.

Uncertain times

Starting to work in a distributed way for the first time and doing it in the midst of a pandemic was the new normal this spring. We discussed about:

The benefits and the challenges of working distributed starting from Sam Harris podcast ”The future of work” https://play.acast.com/s/14454785-6f57-44f1-a40f-e342702509f7/d3459c1a-54ff-4ec7-97e6-802bbececf95 In the podcast there are many insightful points like how you should think about written communication in a remote setting, asynchronous communication in the team, and doing the mistake of translating physical meetings into remote ones and think you can run them in in the same way. Definitely worth listening and discussing if you want to consider making this ”distributed experiment” a long-term solution.
In uncertain times fear can immobilize us. A framework to overcome immobility could be then to set fears instead of goals. This ted talk of Tim Ferris was about that https://youtu.be/5J6jAC6XxAI

Product Delivery & Discovery

We covered many articles about how to best do delivery and discovery in product teams and how to find that perfect balance between the two parts.

Delivering sooner by starting later by Stefan Willuda https://medium.com/@stefan.willuda/delivering-sooner-by-starting-later-1cbf2e5b9f03 was an interesting starting point to talk about WIP-limit, waiting time in the team and how to best use capacity. We were all in agreement that the point is not to always be doing something, but to make sure that we deliver on the important stuff.
Product Discovery and multitrack of madness by Lucio Santana illustrate really well all the different steps of opportunity, viability and usability. And the different mindsets required for each and every one of them https://medium.com/swlh/product-discovery-in-the-multitrack-of-madness-cfe8632f1962
An hot topic for the spring was also Teresa Torres and her opportunity solution tree as one of our teams started to work with it https://www.producttalk.org/2016/08/opportunity-solution-tree/

Working with stakeholder

What are the needs of different stakeholders? How can we create trust along all the chain? How can stakeholder empower the team with an outcome and not an output? How can the team communicate progress and learnings towards the goal concretely? We talked about this and much more starting from these articles:

John Cutler on product vision and have a roadmap of features generated a really interesting conversation about stakeholder expectations and how we can better work with communicating outcomes as well as learnings and progress https://cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-2153-vision-and-prescriptive
Dual track stakeholder review by Jeff Patton on how to involve stakeholders in different steps of the process https://www.jpattonassociates.com/dual-track-stakeholder-review/

If you have any interesting articles let me know, we will continue the club during the fall. And if you decide to start a book club, let me know how it goes!