One really important piece of the product culture at Hemnet is our own product development book club. A forum where every week we meet and discuss an article about product development and reflect on how we could apply that specific thought to our day to day work.

Anyone in the company can share an article with the group, and that is the reason why our discussion topics are really broad: from product strategy to discovery and event storming. This is what we have been reading and discussing during the last months of 2020.

Product strategy and OKRs:

This fall one really hot topic of the club was product strategy and goal setting.

• I started to work on Hemnet three-years product strategy in September getting the book club members’ eyes on the strategy was priceless to get really early feedback on the formulation. We didn’t only read, but we talked a lot. I reflected on the process and wrote an article about how we worked with the product strategy.

• John Cutler’s take on strategy and structure: https://cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-4153-strategy-and-structure

• OKRs are hard, therefore we always like to discuss how others approach the topic. This article shares 4 ideas on how to think about objectives and key results

• Radhika Dutt's talk about radical product and working towards executing on a vision made us discuss vision, strategy, and reasons for being of a company. Despite the fact that I do not share Radhika’s take on vision, I thought it was an excellent starting point to talk about these subjects.

Customer-centric product development:

Innovate on behalf of the customer is the most important job of a product team, but how do you do it in the best way?

• Innovate around customer needs: this article explains the concept in an easy to grasp way

• Making data usable by your users and not just showing them might be more complex than it seems. This piece by Kristen Bergman gives some interesting examples

• A real-life example of product discovery, coming from Teresa Torres’s blog: https://www.producttalk.org/2020/12/discover-a-new-market/

Mental models for prioritizing and thinking about product:

Prioritization techniques and methods to identify which phases of a product you are in never get out of fashion. This fall we discussed a couple of articles that were written from an engineering point of view, which gave an interesting perspective to the conversation.

• ICE prioritization framework: we discussed the ”confidence” part of the framework and how we could define confidence in a good way. One shortcoming that we found in this approach is that you need high confidence to get a high score, which means that initiatives that we already know a lot about will more likely be prioritized while learning initiatives will not. But certainty over discovery and learning is not always a good thing.

• Explore, expand, extract Kent Beck presents an engineering point of view on what to think about when developing products at different stages. Really concrete tips on how to identify the different phases and act accordingly.

• Event storming is a technique to create a common language and understanding between business and engineering. We resonated on when it could be good to use it and landed that the most interesting usage of it is when starting something new.