Hemnet product development book club - spring-summer 2022
If you are looking for some insightful articles to read while relaxing in the sun, or if you want something to motivate you when coming back to work, here comes some inspiration. This is what we have been reading and discussing in our article club at Hemnet.
Continuous Discovery
All of Hemnet's product teams are now working with continuous discovery and Teresa Torres’ opportunity solution tree. Therefore talks and articles giving insights on real-life examples and digging deeper into what an opportunity is, were really popular in our article club.
How do you build an opportunity solution tree when your product is not created yet? Continuous discovery pre product market-fit is the topic of this podcast
Differentiating between discovery opportunities and discovery solutions is probably one of the most important things to get right when starting to work with the opportunity solution tree. This article clarifies the differences in a super pedagogic way.
Concrete and super actionable framework about how to turn user research into outcome. Typical Cutler style.
Innovation
What is innovation, how to innovate, what to innovate, and at what pace? Million-dollar questions that we did not find an answer for, but we surely got inspired by some smart people out there talking about it.
Does innovation really have to be something new? In this article, Jessica Tenuta makes the point that many times innovation is an evolution and not a revolution. And unless you want to really create a new category (and how many companies succeed in doing that?) then the most important thing is to think about reducing the cost of change.
How can we innovate by leveraging the differences that are present in a team? In this article about experiences, wisdom, and phases of life, there is a lot of food for thought. A super recommended read, even for the ones not directly working with product development.
Working on the right things
Always at the top of the list of any product team agenda is prioritization, data, and decision-making. How do we know what we are working is right, how do we make sure that when we work on something, we can achieve speed in our decisions, and how do we measure success? We read and discuss articles that gave different viewpoints on the subject.
Decisions, decisions - In his articles Bart Krawczyk brings up many different concrete mental models for prioritization, but what we particularly discussed was the importance of identifying decision sizes. And how sometimes failing to identify which kind of decision you are taking in the team, creates a domain effect of consequences.
How to measure what matters? We read this article about Netflix shifting their north-star to better capture their work with engagement. If you start optimizing for content consumption, when do you know what is good?
We often debate about A/B testing, its purpose, and when it should be used and this article fueled the discussion. I think is super interesting to reflect on how A/B test can really be used as a safety net, and in its turn create a culture of extra carefulness, where risk is not welcome. If A/B testing becomes THE tool used for testing everything, from assumptions to any single data-gathering process, is it really good practice in product development? One of my favorite discussions was about creating a portfolio of testing tools to be used according to the situation. Do you want to test a hypothesis? Prototype, and talk to the customer. Do you want to create a safety net? Understand what is the level of risk the business is willing to take, and what is the alternative cost of testing. Is something really risky and hard to test otherwise? Maybe an A/B test is the way to go.
How do you define success for a product that is not launched yet? The best input from this podcast was about defining exit metrics and taking inspiration from adjacent industries to get a benchmark. Listen around minuet 24.
Social Impact
And last but not least, we listened to a podcast about social impact, and discussed what every company can do to make its part in creating a better world. Personally, I believe that there is nothing as powerful as cause-driven development, and it made me really happy to see all the engagement in the organization once we read this. Try it out, you might find something you can do today to make the world a better place.