Product Management Confabulation

Welcome to 2025! As we kick off a new year, it’s time for my annual letter.

For the past several years, I’ve used my annual letters to reflect on the past year, share where I intend to focus during the upcoming year, and provide a guide for folks who might be interested in working with us.

2024: A Quick Look Back

I started the year feeling burnt out. I had spent the previous three years writing and promoting my book. I was doing several speaking events and podcast interviews each week. We grew the Product Talk blog to weekly articles. I was recording short-form videos every weekday. And of course, I was still teaching, designing courses, running our community, and managing the business. It was a lot and I was tired.

I was also feeling down about the state of the world: the impact of the pandemic, the layoffs across the tech industry, the political divisiveness in the United States, and around the world.

For the second time in 20 years, I wasn’t particularly motivated to set business goals. I couldn’t get excited about growth. Nothing sounded appealing to me. I was bouncing between far too many things that could come next (a new book, a new course, something completely different). I was swirling.

So I set a simple goal for 2024: to re-find joy in my work. I’m happy to report I have mostly done that. And a little bit more.

I set a simple goal for 2024: to re-find joy in my work. I’m happy to report I have mostly done that. And a little bit more. – Tweet This

Here are some of my 2024 highlights:

• I reworked our CDH Membership program to better serve our students and fixed some of the initial challenges with our original design that were making it not fun for me. I’m happy to report that while the changes resulted in a smaller community, I am thrilled with where we have landed and am once again having fun with the community.
• We launched our first self-paced course: Customer Recruiting for Continuous Discovery. This course is important to me for several reasons. It allows us to reach students all over the world (no matter what time zone they live in), at a lower price point, and it solves one of the most common barriers teams face when trying to adopt continuous discovery: getting access to customers. If you haven’t already checked it out, please do so here.
• I’ve been experimenting relentlessly with how to provide more value on social media while also growing our business. The social media landscape is changing quickly. It’s getting harder to earn traffic from networks fixated on being walled gardens. AI-generated comments make it harder to know who is trying to genuinely engage. We are seeing more smaller networks, rather than fewer large networks. This might be a good thing in the long run, but as a small business it’s hard to know where to spend my time.
• I’ve doubled down on our Product Talk Daily email, trying to make it as valuable as possible so I can earn a spot in your inbox and be less dependent on social media.
• We launched four new webinars and are now offering all five of our webinars every quarter.
• We’ve completed our first full year of Product Discovery Discussion sessions for Senior Leaders. It took us a while to settle on a format that worked, but I really enjoy how these are turning out. They feel like genuine opportunities to connect that seem to be missing in public spaces. If you are a senior leader (e.g. CPO, SVP, VP) and haven’t joined one of these events in a while, come check them out again. You can apply here.
• We continue to offer all of our courses throughout the year and have seen significant growth in our corporate cohorts.

I’ve been experimenting relentlessly with how to provide more value on social media while also growing our business. The social media landscape is changing quickly. – Tweet This

2025: The Plan for the Year Ahead

As I’ve written about several times in the past, my North Star metric at Product Talk is to increase the number of product teams who adopt continuous discovery. While this is difficult to measure, it’s a strong directional goal that guides everything that I do.

In 2025, I’ll be focusing on two key themes to support this goal: accessibility and genuine connection.

In 2025, I’ll be focusing on two key themes to support my goal of increasing the number of teams who adopt continuous discovery: accessibility and genuine connection. – Tweet This

Accessibility: Making It Easier for More People to Adopt the Discovery Habits

I could have framed this theme as scale or growth, but I’m struggling with our collective obsession with growth. I’m not trying to build an empire. I simply want to help people who want to work this way. I’m not interested in growth for growth’s sake.

I’m struggling with our collective obsession with growth. I’m not trying to build an empire. I simply want to help people who want to adopt continuous discovery. I’m not interested in growth for growth’s sake. – Tweet This

After wrestling with this for a couple of years, I’ve settled on accessibility as a better framing for this type of work. Here’s why I think this distinction matters: When I frame it as scale or growth, I start to get itchy about having to proselytize. I don’t want to convince people that this is what they should be doing. We all work in a wide variety of environments and continuous discovery isn’t for everyone.

But if instead, I frame it as accessibility, I can focus on the people who already want to work this way and help more of them unlock the ability to do so. That feels much better to me.

As part of this theme, I’ll be focusing on a few initiatives:

More self-paced courses: I resisted self-paced courses for many years, because I was worried about their impact. Too many people purchase self-paced courses, but never complete them. And for the ones who do complete them, they often serve more as edutainment, rather than real learning. But this TED talk helped me reframe self-paced learning. I realized that my objections were simply design constraints that I could work with. So I started to work on a self-paced course framework that was built around deliberate practice, completion rates, and measurable learning objectives.

In the fall of 2024, I launched my first self-paced course: Customer Recruiting for Continuous Discovery. Throughout the year, I’ll be working on offering more self-paced course options, starting with the content from our Continuous Interviewing and Opportunity Mapping courses.

This falls under the accessibility theme for me as it allows people from all over the world to engage with our content, whereas right now, we only reach folks who live in the time zones where we can offer live cohorts. It also allows me to offer courses at a lower price point in a more sustainable way.

Add subtitles to all of our course videos. I’m embarrassed to admit that not all of our course videos have subtitles. But I’m slowly fixing this. I know that generative AI can now do this effectively for free, but the output doesn’t meet my standards. So I’m still relying on real human transcribers. This takes time and money. So I’m tackling this iteratively, course by course.

As of this writing, both Assumption Testing and Customer Recruiting courses have 100% subtitle coverage. My hope is by the end of 2025, we’ll be able to say the same for all of our courses.

Support more learning styles. All of our courses include a mix of videos, articles, live lecture, hands-on practice sessions, and discussion. But we could do a better job of providing the same content in different formats (e.g. the same lesson in video, audio, text, and a checklist takeaway). As I work to offer all of our course content in both live-taught cohorts and self-paced options, I’ll also be creating content that supports more diverse learning styles. I’m also looking into offering Product Talk blog posts in podcast form. I’m hoping this is something I can start offering at some point this year.

Offer our content in more languages. This is a stretch goal for 2025. But I do plan to offer Continuous Discovery Habits in more languages, offer language-specific practice groups in our live-cohort courses, and eventually translate all of our course content into other languages. This is going to be a huge undertaking and my current plan is to roll out one language at a time. For example, if we were to start with Spanish, I’ll release a Spanish translation of the book, offer Spanish practice groups in our live-cohort courses, and do a Spanish translation of our course content, before moving on to the next language. I suspect this will be a multi-year project, but I’d like to at least have a solid plan in place for the first language before the end of the year. If this is something you can help with, please get in touch.

Write more about “Something is better than nothing.” This was a strong theme of my Y Oslo talk and fireside chat and it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot. Too many people assume that if you can’t adopt all of the discovery habits then there’s no benefit to doing any of the habits. But that’s simply not true. I included “habits” in the title of my book for a reason. This way of working is a collection of habits. We can work on one habit at a time. I realize I can do more to help teams and individuals find their first steps.

Too many people assume that if you can’t adopt all of the discovery habits then there’s no benefit to doing any of the habits. But that’s simply not true. – Tweet This

Genuine Connection: Cut the Noise and Go Deeper with People Willing to Do the Work

Over the last couple of years as I struggled with burnout, I realized that a big driver of this is the fact that I am bombarded all day with a lot of low-quality interactions. Now, I’m reluctant to use that term because I’m going to get a lot of flak for it. But let me give a couple of examples of what I mean.

Every day when I log in to LinkedIn, I get about two dozen notifications about new comments on my posts. At least half of those new comments are AI-generated comments that simply re-summarize what I wrote. Here’s an example:

On the face of it, these both look like reasonable comments. But these two people comment on everything that I post. The first person always says they are curious about something that is already answered in both the post and the linked article, making it clear they never read either. The second person has experience with everything I post. And her “experience” is always a regurgitated word salad from the article itself.

Notice how they are both coaches. They are doing this to build their brand. But it contributes absolutely nothing to the conversation. Every day, one or two more people pop up who do the same thing. It’s not always easy to tell that these aren’t genuine comments right away. But after a while, I realize they are commenting on everything the exact same way.

This may not seem like a big deal. But it’s exhausting. I want to genuinely engage with the people who want to learn, who have read the content and have real questions, or have something to contribute to the conversation. But to do so, I have to filter out a lot of noise.

I also get several emails, Slack messages, LinkedIn messages, tweets, etc. with what I call lazy questions. Again, some of you might cringe at that term. So let me explain. A lazy question is a question that is impossible to answer either because it’s too broad or it’s missing necessary context.

For example, “How do I find customers to interview?” is a lazy question. There isn’t one answer to this question. It depends on who your customers are, what you’ve tried to do to reach them, what has worked, and what hasn’t.

But people who write lazy questions don’t want to put in the work to provide this necessary context. Oftentimes, it’s because they haven’t tried anything. They haven’t read the introductory resources. They haven’t taken the first step.

Trying to help these people is exhausting. In 2024, I realized I spent way too much time trying to help the wrong people. And so in 2025, I’m going to be much more deliberate about only engaging with people who are doing the work.

Let me give you another example.

Craig and Amanda, two product managers at Convo, are working hard to adopt the discovery habits. They’ve enrolled in several of our Deep Dive courses and they are active participants in our CDH Slack community. They ask questions on a weekly basis. They attend almost all of our community calls and Office Hours sessions and regularly seek input on their work. But they don’t ask lazy questions.

They recently engaged their senior stakeholders to discuss their business outcomes and product outcomes for the upcoming year. They interview customers every week and have shared with the community how they have automated their interviewing process (we even feature them in our Customer Recruiting course). They regularly share their latest assumption tests and ask for feedback on how to interpret their results. You might remember we featured some of their assumption tests in this post.

Here’s what Amanda and Craig do well: They share context. They provide details. They communicate what they’ve tried, what has worked, where they are struggling, and they do the work to enumerate specific questions for the community to weigh in on.

They make it easy and delightful to help them. Engaging with them gives me joy. This is how I want to spend my time.

My genuine connection theme for 2025 is about finding more Amandas and Craigs. I have several ideas for how to do this.

Continue hosting monthly product leader discussion sessions. These conversations have evolved into exactly what I hoped—a safe place for senior leaders to share their real challenges with managing continuous discovery teams. Each month, we dive deep into a single leader’s organizational context. That leader shares their biggest challenge and the rest of the group advises. It’s a lot of fun. If you are a senior leader (think C-level executive, SVP, or VP), you can apply to join the next one here.

Double down on the CDH Slack community and Product Talk Daily. These are two community spaces where I can cultivate deeper connections with product teams who are working the habits. The Slack community allows people to get real-time help with what they are experiencing at work right now. The Product Talk Daily email is an easy way to read and discuss one or two meaningful articles and one short video every day. It’s all about taking tiny steps to get a little better every day. If you haven’t checked out either of these communities, you can learn about our Slack community here and find the latest issues of Product Talk Daily here.

Keep experimenting with how to drive authentic conversation on social media. Even though social media is the primary driver of my burnout, I’m not ready to give up. For every troll or AI-generated comment, I also get amazing feedback, good questions, and insightful comments that I learn from every day. But I am going to continue to experiment with how to do less broadcasting and more conversing. If you’d like to come along for the ride, you can find me on LinkedIn, Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, and YouTube. I’ve decided to discontinue my Instagram and TikTok channels.

Even though social media is the primary driver of my burnout, I’m not ready to give up. For every troll or AI-generated comment, I also get amazing feedback, good questions, and insightful comments. – Tweet This

Let’s Work Together: A Guide to What We Do (And What We Don’t)

At Product Talk, we strive to be the best place to help product teams invest in their product discovery skills. We do this through a combination of speaking engagements, courses (both live cohort-based and self-paced), and coaching.

If you are interested in having me speak at your company, you can learn about my speaking engagements here. Please note, I am no longer traveling for speaking engagements and am only doing virtual events. The economic cost (in lost days to travel), the personal cost (as an introvert this type of travel takes a huge toll on me), and the sustainability cost (it no longer makes sense to fly around the world for a one-hour event) are too much for me to justify doing in-person engagements.

If you are interested in our courses, you can find the full lineup here.

We have recently rebranded our Master Class: Continuous Discovery Habits. It is now our Product Discovery Fundamentals course. This course has always been our introductory course and the course name caused a lot of confusion. If you or your teams are new to discovery, this is the course for you.

If, on the other hand, you’ve read the book and are already starting to put some of the habits into place, our Deep Dive courses are a better fit. These courses are designed to build skill quickly in a single habit.

We offer all of our courses in two formats:

1) public cohorts are open to the public and are offered throughout the year.

2) corporate cohorts are private to a single company and can be scheduled on days/times that work best for your team.

If you are interested in a private cohort of any of our courses, get in touch.

For larger organizations, we are also working on a “train the trainers” program to help you scale our training across your organization.

If you are interested in coaching, we offer both product trio coaching and organization-wide group coaching options. However, due to demand, we limit our coaching to alumni of our course programs. Our courses are a more effective way to teach the basics and allow us to go much deeper in coaching. So if you are interested in coaching, please start with our courses.

Due to high demand and limited working hours, we don’t offer bespoke consulting or trainings other than our listed courses.

Thanks for reading and I look forward to our paths crossing in 2025!

The post Let’s Connect in 2025: A Look at the Year Ahead appeared first on Product Talk.