Plays

Here's an index of all the plays in the Head of Product Playbook:

Focus + Prioritization

Most product teams self-sabotage by spreading energy across too many ideas at once. Instead, make the tough choices that amplify impact.

Triage Prioritization

The classic problem with MoSCoW prioritization is that you end up with too many Must Have items, and the PM gets stuck, unable to prioritize them.

Head of Product PlaybookAlex Pukinskis

Story Mapping

Use a User Story Map as a negotiation tool with the team to figure out what your product increments will be.

Head of Product PlaybookAlex Pukinskis

Collaborative Feature Scoring

For companies that deliver 10-30 features per quarter across a handful of development teams, PMs will have different intuitions about what matters. Using a structured approach to align their intuitive perceptions might help.

Head of Product PlaybookAlex Pukinskis

Calculate Cost of Delay

The ideal context for this play is a financially savvy company struggling with product prioritization conversations that are emotional, anecdote-driven, and intuitive.

Head of Product PlaybookAlex Pukinskis

Quarterly Delivery Planning

The roadmap is full of dates with unknown origins. Engineering is complaining about shifting priorities. PMs are surprised by and complaining about dependencies. PMs are barely keeping up with sprint planning and not providing their teams with a mid- or long-term view.

Head of Product PlaybookAlex Pukinskis

3 Quarterly Rocks

Your team needs focus, but the larger organization struggles with setting measurable goals. Instead of OKRs, find your ‘big rocks’

Head of Product PlaybookAlex Pukinskis

Loose Goals

I would love to have SMART goals all the time, but sometimes executives resist being specific. Sometimes it’s more valuable to keep options open…

Head of Product PlaybookAlex Pukinskis

OKR plays for Product

I don’t reach to OKRs often, because most companies lack the maturity to use them. But, there is one kind of company where they make sense.

Head of Product PlaybookAlex Pukinskis

Portfolio + Strategy

Most companies invest based on tradition and lobbying. What if we tried to do it intentionally?

Portfolio Grading by Horizon

You have a lot of offerings in your product portfolio and your spending on them is based on a mixture of tradition, emotion, and advocacy.

Head of Product PlaybookAlex Pukinskis

Foraging for Strategy

There is no single set of strategic documents. The PMs are struggling to prioritize, or make prioritization decisions in conflict with each other.

Head of Product PlaybookAlex Pukinskis

Strategy Brief / A3

A PM is waiting for clarity from the company about direction. Surprisingly, the execs feel that they have given perfectly clear direction. Use a 2-page strategy brief to build consensus.

Head of Product PlaybookAlex Pukinskis

Impact

Most product features are never used and have no business impact. How can we learn to stop building those?

Write down why

A good PM is also like a hunting dog, with a keen sense of smell for what the company expects of them. If the company just wants more and more features, how do we convince PMs to move out of feature factory mode?

Head of Product PlaybookAlex Pukinskis

Learning, not failure

Once the hypothesis is written down, how can we make it safe for PMs to learn, take action, and talk about what they learned?

Head of Product PlaybookAlex Pukinskis

Leading Product Managers

Product managers are smart. How about we start to allow them to bring their entire brains to work?

Oxygen Mask

Put on your own oxygen mask before helping others. Before you take action or applying other plays, ask yourself, “Am I asphyxiating? Am I being buried alive? Am I suffering self-induced overload?”

Head of Product PlaybookAlex Pukinskis

Change Experiments

You want to roll out a change, but that change involves other humans who have other things in mind.

Head of Product PlaybookAlex Pukinskis

Intentional Calendar Design

Outlook and Google calendar have one goal: To fill every hour of your day with meetings. Is that the best way for you to be productive?

Head of Product PlaybookAlex Pukinskis

Short Videos

Does your team ignore written messages? Get in the habit of making quick videos, not more than 7 minutes.

Head of Product PlaybookAlex Pukinskis

Office Hours

Most product leaders have packed calendars, and this can mean it’s hard to find time for quick, spontaneous conversations. Book set times each week when PMs know they can always find you.

Head of Product PlaybookAlex Pukinskis

No-Agenda PM weekly

Book an hour on Thursday or Friday for the team to meet. Don’t have an agenda, don’t try to lead the discussion, and don’t collect action items. Simply talk informally about whatever comes up, like a Quaker meeting.

Head of Product PlaybookAlex Pukinskis

Stakeholders

How do we partner with the rest of the business so that they understand, appreciate, and support what we are building?

Product Councils

Form product councils for each of your main product areas. Hold a monthly, 90 minute meeting with 5-20 stakeholders where you share progress, present priorities, get feedback, and build buy-in all at once.

Head of Product PlaybookAlex Pukinskis

And here's a backlog of some future plays to come. (These might not be written in exactly this order, or with these titles)