Overview

When building a product, don’t bank on a second version ever shipping. Make sure the first version is a complete product because it may be out there forever. When software was sold on shelves, teams had to live with version 1 forever. How it’s useful When you’re defining the first version of your product, you will accumulate all sorts of amazing features that you dream of adding on later in future versions. Recognize that these may never ship, because you never know what can happen: company strategy changes, your lead engineer quits, or the whole team gets reallocated to other projects. To hedge against these scenarios, make sure that whatever you ship is a “complete product” which, if it was never improved again, would still be useful to customers for the foreseeable future. Don’t ship a feature that relies on future improvements in order to actually solve the problem well. —Brandon Chu

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Product Management Mental Models for Everyone

Mental models are simple expressions of complex processes or relationships. These models are accumulated over time by an individual and used to make faster and better decisions. Here's an example: the Pareto Principle states that roughly 80% of all outputs comes from 20% of the effort.

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