Inside today’s Product Management community, agile practitioners, and related disciplines I observe a trend that confuses me: it seems like everybody wants to publish a book. Let me be clear here when I say “book”, I mean this: a long piece of text, 300+ pages, created over several months, reviewed by a few people only, then printed on paper, shipped as hard copies, and hard to change afterward.
🔥🔥🔥Isn’t this exactly the waterfall approach?🔥🔥🔥
To me, it’s a paradox: while, in our daily jobs, we advocate for agility, we rely on nearly 600 years old processes to share ideas?!
To further illustrate what I am referring to, let’s compare to digital products:
For digital products, we create MVPs, Fake Doors, A/B tests, and much more to ensure value and usability. But a book gets printed, shipped, and sold — take it or leave it!
Even more, for digital products we implement continuous delivery in order to be able to iterate and adjust quickly. But once a physical book is printed, it is “final” and cannot be changed at all.
For digital products, we carefully craft User Personas to understand their jobs and to optimize for these. But the book is one-size-fits-all.
We are keen to build deep analytics into digital products in order to observe and understand the behavior of users. But how do we know how readers get along with the book?
We also engage with users and customers for qualitative feedback on digital products. But before a book gets printed, it is only reviewed by maybe a handful of people.
PLG is becoming mainstream, we want to use the product for all things activation, onboarding, or selling. But every hard-copy book requires old-style Marketing.
Shouldn’t every Product Manager steer clear of these situations?!
A few great exceptions exist, for example, Amplitude’s North Star Playbook or the Product Discovery Resources Hub by Tim Herbig. They have taken the concept of a book and adapted it for the Internet.
We are on a similar mission by compiling our ideas, tools, frameworks, and experiences into the B2B Product Playbook. Not only is it a FREE resource but we also plan to update and extend constantly, including the involvement of other thought leaders.
Actually, it is already version 2 of our “product” since the PM Curriculum, as a free collection of resources published via Notion has been around for some years. Time not just for a minor update but a huge rework. Including a completely new website that gives us more control over structure and design — and will also allow for better engagement with our readers.
As a sneak preview, the following depicts the process we are discussing in very much detail apart from extensive libraries of tools and books:
No fluffs, not just repeating standard textbook knowledge. But proven processes, tools, methods, and hints that worked for us.
Actually, the website is already live at https://b2b-product-playbook.com. It is not final yet (and probably will never be) but, hey:
If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.
— Reid Hoffman
Being Product Managers at heart, we consider this as an experiment. We will keep adding, changing, and adjusting content based on feedback. We are also open to more contributors — just contact us.