Product Collective - 🔧 Keep iterating your product

Why you should iterate your product and how to do it

Product iteration is a widely accepted, and often misunderstood, approach to product development. While most product people know they should iterate their product, they aren’t always sure why they should iterate. As a result, their attempts at iteration are not as effective as they could be. Here are some resources that explain why you should iterate your product and how to make those iterations count.

Understanding the iterative process, with examples. The iterative process is one of those words that, like Agile, automatically makes us think of engineering teams. But most teams iterate in one way or another, and using an iterative method can help you reduce risk, manage efficiency, and approach problems in a more flexible and dynamic way. Julia Martins walks you through how to define the iterative process, as well as how to implement this process on your own team.

(via @asana)

A guide to iterative processes in product development. In both the SaaS world and consumer products, product iterations are par for the course. You launch something and you make it better and better. But what does it really mean to iterate? And how can you develop future product iterations that will continue to win over customers? Dayana Mayfield defines a logical process, showcases a few examples, and offers expert advice to help you master the iterative development process.

(via @Devsquad)

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A lot to be grateful for

This time of year, it’s only natural to pause and reflect on what you may be grateful for. The truth is – we have so much to be grateful for here at Product Collective. We thought we’d share a few things that especially come to mind.

First, we’re just grateful to even exist. Seriously. To be honest, when COVID struck in early 2020, we had no idea if a business like ours could outlast a global pandemic. Yet, here we are – stronger than ever before. 

We’re grateful to be getting people back together again. While we really enjoy serving product people year-round through our newsletter, the Rocketship.FM podcast, and our INDUSTRY Interview live video Q&A chats – we especially love being with our Product Collective community in person. In 2023, we’ll be holding three in-person events for the first time ever – with INDUSTRY Europe in March, the New York Product Conference in May, and our flagship conference, INDUSTRY Global, in October. And I really can’t wait to be among our product people. 

We’re certainly grateful for the product leaders we’ve worked with as speakers and sponsors of our community. One of my favorite things to do is highlighting these people and companies, shining a spotlight where it’s much deserved.

But there’s one thing we’re most grateful for…

You! 

Seriously, thank you. We so appreciate you being a part of our Product Collective community and helping grow it to become the longest-running and largest independent community of product management professionals. We are so, so grateful for your support. 

The ultimate guide to product iteration. Successful product teams constantly concern themselves with how to maintain a great product. To build and deliver a great product, they inevitably employ an incremental process. Madalina Lacatis put together a guide to product iteration to explain how you can easily manage your product’s evolution throughout its development.

(via @digitalya_co)

Actually, it’s pretty easy to make “10 to 20 iterations a week”. Antonio Neto has a love-hate relationship with Marty Cagan’s book Inspired. One quote from Inspired that a lot of product people scoff at upon first reading is that “strong teams normally test many product ideas each week — on the order of 10 to 20 or more per week.” Antonio explains why doing 10 iterations per week is not only feasible, but it’s also very common.

(via @uxdesigncc)

How to go about iterating on products. As Ryan Flomerfelt Mather has gained more experience as a product designer, he thinks it has gotten easier to navigate the process of making products. Ryan thought it might be useful to others to share his overall approach to iterating products which is guided by one key rule: learn as much as possible as quickly as possible.

(via @Flomerboy)

Is self-service BI realistic or just an empty advertising promise?

Business Intelligence / Analytics providers will often make bold claims about self-service leading users to expect that anyone can jump right into their company data and find ground-breaking insights. In this webinar, we explore whether self-service BI is realistic or just an empty advertising promise.

Can anyone create custom dashboards using a modern BI tool? Is it realistic to have "Dashboard in a Day" training to allow users to explore data or build their own content? Like a mountain, a complex BI project can be a deep, impassable valley with painstakingly high peaks followed by more yet undiscovered peaks. Most people simply underestimate the complexity involved.

We'll dive into all of this — plus, answer your questions as well!

Growing a Product Organization from the Early Days

Managing a product team is hard enough. But what happens when you're tasked with building the team when you're in the beginning stages? There are a whole set of new challenges that come along with building and growing a product organization. We'll get into those challenges — as well as ideas on how to flourish and set yourself up for success — in this interactive discussion.