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Building products is often overwhelming. With an ever-growing to do list, engineers who need motivating, stakeholders who need managing and reports that need compiling. We’re here to help.
Designed to be used as points of reference throughout your day, the Department of Product’s digital guidebooks are bite-sized bundles of knowledge, tips and tidbits to help you make better product decisions.
Latest articles
Why product features matter
Feature factories is the term people use when they’re working at a company who’s idea of product strategy is putting a spreadsheet together with a shopping list of items that need to be delivered with a few dates slapped next to them. But as real as these frustrations are, it’s also worth asking: what if features actually do matter?
Component Oriented Thinking for Product Managers
Components mean many things to different members of a modern product team. For a product manager, using components means building reusable pieces of value which cut down future development time and leads to shipping more value faster.
5 Ways to use Post it Notes as a Product Manager
They’re a tech company cliche. And here’s 5 ways you and your product team can use post it notes effectively.
How to Agree Ways of Working as a Product Team
Things feel a little stale. You’re stuck in a bit of a rut. The team’s energy isn’t quite what it used to be. And you’re not able to quite pinpoint exactly what has led you to feel this way. This can – and probably will – happen to all product teams at some point. A ways of working session might be just what you need to get you back up and running, feeling energised and rebooted.
Radical product strategy
In 2011 when I founded Likelii, we had a clear vision: To make it easier and fun for wine enthusiasts to find wines they were likely to like. But despite having a clear vision, I had caught what I now call the Iteration Epidemic where we try to copy the success of companies that found their success through iteration, trying one strategy after another to find the nirvana of product-market fit.
How to measure product market fit
As we look to challenge ourselves to make the best decisions possible, we often judge our decision making skills on the outcomes we achieved. This isn’t quite right since the outcome itself will always be unpredictable; the results achieved are different to the decision making process which led to a decision being taken. This is known as ‘resulting’ – where you assess the quality of your decision by the outcome it achieved.
Managing UX debt
Why tension between product designers and managers is healthyI was recently asked by a colleague what I found to be the most challenging aspects of product management. Without much thought, I blurted out a response which surprised me a little. ‘Managing the...
Tools for making better product decisions
A good decision can lead to bad results, but so long as the steps you took to make that decision were sound, you can sleep safe at night knowing that you took the best action based on what you knew at the time.
Department of Product
2020 programs
At the Department of Product we specialise in equipping product professionals with essential skills.
Enrollment is now open for our 2020 programs, Web Technologies for Product Managers
and Product Mastery, tailored specifically to meet the needs of product teams.
Briefing
Fave Friday: Favorite email newsletters in order
— Beatriz (@bzdata) November 30, 2018
- @axios
- @StrictlyVC
- @TheChairmanMom
- @ProductHunt
- @Deptofproduct
- @MorningBrew
Send me your favorites!
I wanted to give a very belated thanks and shout out to @Deptofproduct for their insightful content and online courses. I learned a lot from the course I took a while back - thanks again guys!
— Mark Virgin (@MarkVirgin) April 25, 2018
A few of my favorite Product resources:
— Jeff Morris Jr. (@jmj) June 5, 2018
1. Department of Product Briefing https://t.co/dEoqc2Bl9w
2. Product Decodedhttps://t.co/m4aaglcHkz …
3. Ben Thompson https://t.co/xrPvvLZYoK
4. Mind The Producthttps://t.co/1Jg2GYcm8c
5. Data Elixir https://t.co/7Ki7gIdzbQ
