What's Inside
Nine stages from vision to outcome, plus foundational context and advanced guidance.
Front Matter
The Evidence Gap
Why 43% of startups fail from poor product-market fit, the assumption stack that causes it, and what this book will teach you.
How to Use This Playbook
The nine stages, the tools you will need, and the StatusTraq running example that ties everything together.
The Nine Stages
Plant the Flag
Define your product vision, strategic bets, North Star metric, and guardrails - the strategic foundation for every decision that follows.
Know the Terrain
Size your market, map the value chain, define your ICP, build personas, and analyze competitors before talking to a single customer.
Go Where the Work Happens
Master discovery interviews, map how users work today, manage evidence, and identify the job to be done.
Name the Problem
Define desired outcomes, build your Opportunity Solution Tree, size and prioritize opportunities, and map your assumptions.
Test Before You Build
Run rapid experiments, choose validation methods, build the right prototype, test with real users, and kill ideas that don't validate.
Plan the March
Map the future state, write acceptance criteria, define your walking skeleton, and force-rank the backlog.
Tell the Story
Finalize positioning, craft messaging in your customers' words, set pricing and packaging, and plan customer enablement.
Specify the Build
Establish the technical foundation and write requirement packages that trace every feature back to customer evidence.
Close the Loop
Track outcomes, instrument analytics, monitor customer health, run A/B tests, and feed learnings back into continuous discovery.
Going Further
Making It Real
Practical guidance for adopting evidence-based practices: start small, sell to leadership, scale across teams, and build the habit.
The Evolving Product Manager
How AI, technical fluency, and role convergence are reshaping the product management discipline.