Concepts in Product Management, page 21
Stationarity: A Time Series's Stable Personality
A time series is stationary if its statistical personality, like its average and spread, remains constant over time. Many forecasting models require this stability to work correctly.
Make Policies Explicit: Write Down Your Workflow's Rules
Making policies explicit turns your team's unwritten rules into a shared, improvable playbook. Use it to define what 'done' means for each stage or how to handle blocked items.
Platform Envelopment: Eat or Be Eaten
Platform envelopment is when a large platform absorbs a competitor's market by bundling its core features, often for free. This is common in tech, like an OS adding a feature that makes a standalone app obsolete.
Exponential Smoothing: Weighting Recent Data More Heavily
Exponential smoothing creates forecasts from a weighted average of past data, where weights decay exponentially for older points. It's used for quick, reliable predictions like inventory demand. The footgun: simple versions ignore trends and seasonality.
Little's Law: Why Adding More Work Slows You Down
Little's Law shows that average task completion time is proportional to the work in progress (WIP). For a stable team, Cycle Time = WIP / Throughput. It's used in Kanban to predict delivery times. The footgun is adding more WIP to go faster; this always.
Platform Strategy: Solving the Chicken-and-Egg Problem
A platform isn't a product; it's an environment where groups create value for each other. This strategy is key for marketplaces (Uber) or ecosystems (iOS) where value grows with users.
Growth Hacking: Marketing via Rapid Experimentation
Growth hacking treats marketing like a science experiment, using rapid, low-cost tests to find what grows a user base instead of relying on big, slow campaigns. It's used by startups to A/B test ideas before investing resources.
Holt-Winters Exponential Smoothing
Forecast time-series data by giving more weight to recent events. Holt-Winters smoothing is used to analyze metrics and make predictions by accounting for user-defined assumptions like seasonality.
STATIK: Designing a Kanban System from First Principles
STATIK is a diagnostic recipe for designing a Kanban system tailored to your team's actual work, not just copying a template. Use it when starting a new implementation or when an existing process is stuck. The footgun is skipping the analysis.
Trust and Safety: The Immune System of Online Platforms
Trust and Safety is an online platform's immune system, protecting users from harmful content, abuse, and fraud. It's critical for moderating social media and preventing e-commerce scams.
The North Star Metric: Your Company's One True Focus
A North Star Metric (NSM) is your company's compass: a single metric capturing the core value you deliver to customers. Spotify uses 'time spent listening' to align teams on user engagement.
ACF vs. PACF: A Time Series Signal and Its Echo
Autocorrelation (ACF) measures a time series's total correlation with its past, including indirect echoes. Partial Autocorrelation (PACF) isolates the direct correlation by removing intermediate effects. They help select forecasting model parameters.
Stakeholder Communication Plan: Who Gets Told What, and When
A stakeholder communication plan is a roadmap for who needs to know what, when, and how. It's used to keep executives, dependent teams, and users aligned on project progress. The biggest footgun is a one-size-fits-all approach; tailor updates to each group.
Experiment-Driven Organization: Run Your Org Like a Lab
Treat organizational change like a lab experiment, not a big-bang project. This helps companies adapt by testing new processes on a small scale first, generating evidence before committing to a full rollout. The footgun is mistaking chaos for experimentation.
Time Series Cross-Validation
Unlike standard cross-validation that shuffles data, time series cross-validation respects the arrow of time. It evaluates a forecasting model by training only on past data to predict a future point, then rolling forward. The footgun is using random k-folds.
Managing Up: Be the Co-Pilot, Not Just a Passenger
Managing up isn't flattery; it's making your manager more effective by aligning your work with their goals. This is key for getting projects resourced and ensuring your priorities align with the organization's, preventing wasted effort.
Growth Loops: The Engine of Product Growth
A growth loop is a closed system where outputs are reinvested to generate more inputs, creating compounding growth. Unlike linear funnels, this model unifies product, marketing, and monetization. The footgun is using funnels, which creates silos.
Prophet: Automated Time Series Forecasting
Prophet treats forecasting like decomposing a signal, breaking a time series into trend, seasonality, and holiday effects. It excels at predicting business metrics with strong seasonal patterns, like web traffic.
Lead Time: From Customer Request to Live Code
Lead Time measures the total duration from when a feature is requested to when it's live for users—it's the customer's total waiting time. Teams use it to understand responsiveness and set predictable timelines. The footgun is confusing it with Cycle Time.
Strategic Narrative: Your Company's Source Code for Story
A strategic narrative is the source code for your company's story, defining its unique value. It's the blueprint for marketing, sales, and internal decisions, ensuring everyone tells the same story.
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