Psychotherapist and relationship expert Esther Perel has this great framing:

"a paradox to manage, not a problem to solve.”

Many aspects of life, business, product, leadership, relationships, etc are paradoxical.

• Strategy vs execution

• Customer vs business impact

• Explore vs exploit

• Realistic vs ambitious

• Take risks vs have security

• etc…

“Deciding to invest in your Product sense is among the highest ROI decisions you’ll make in your career.” - Shreyas Doshi

I want to do two things in this post:

1) Give you actionable ways to build product sense.

2) Explain what the hell Product Sparring is and how product leaders can use it to build product sense in their teams.

From my experience, there are two common reasons why I see product backlogs become long and unmanageable.

​A lack of strategy​ and, therefore, backlogs become a dumping ground for any and every idea.

Working big, breaking down big solutions, rather than breaking down the outcome (refer to ​my last post​)

Companies that move fast make decisions fast.

What takes one company a week, they do in a day. Compound that over time, and it’s a landslide.

The optimization problem is the problem of finding the best solution from all feasible solutions.

But what does the optimization problem look like in companies?

Let’s start with what being Product-Led is not… It’s not: Product Management-led, Product Managers are the boss, Where product makes all the calls, Something that only engineering and product do…