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Tell me you’re a novice without telling me you’re a novice; examples: - Product Managers who quote frameworks instead of *using* frameworks (with experienced PMs, product frameworks are so internalised they almost never cite them; got this from

@johncutlefish

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Lots of very curious, awesome, sponge like learners as well. They’ll be the first to say they are learning.

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True — but the reason this observation was so valuable to me was that I turned it into “if I want to be good, I should internalise product frameworks so that they become second nature to me.”

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Do you have a writeup / more to say about this? I've always been skeptical of frameworks (from time in mgmt consulting to product mgmt), but come back to a very small set of sometimes-useful frameworks serving as inspo for purpose-built frameworks. Love to hear others' thoughts.

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I got this specifically from a tacit knowledge extraction from John: commoncog.com/blog/john-cutl There are other cues that he pays attention to, the most significant of which is probably the existence of something he calls ‘flow’.

commoncog.com

John Cutler’s Product Org Expertise

A few weeks ago, I helped Amplitude head of product education John Cutler extract tacit expertise around diagnosing and improving product organisations. Here's how that went.

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Nice, I've read this really interesting piece of yours before, and just re-read. I'm particularly interested in your process of internalizing product frameworks, and what that looked like (and which frameworks you thought most useful, looking back).

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To be honest, I don’t have a particularly good approach right now. Still stuck in the trial and error phase. (To be more specific my goal is ‘product taste’; but I don’t yet see a clear path to it quite yet).

commoncog.com

Product Validation Frameworks are Useless Without Taste

Product validation frameworks often describe processes without talking about taste. Here's why this is almost always a bad idea.

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This is a cool post, thanks for sharing! Product taste seems basically like the quality of being good at guessing if a product will be successful, without having / being able to do deep customer research to validate it in advance?

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Yeah, that sounds about right. I’m tempted to hedge, but then again it does seem like some people have a higher hit rate than others. And assuming this is skill, not luck, how do you get to it?

11:00 AM · Jun 14, 2022Twitter Web App

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It definitely seems like a real thing. Spitballing, but a few components of taste that seem related & attainable: - Domain knowledge - Empathy - Nth-order thinking - Analogy bank - Bayesian tendencies