4 Ways to F Up Product Development

I love sharing frameworks. I love using alliteration. I love building products. Get ready.

In my view, structured product development involves planning a route and allowing for detours; you have to iterate and innovate on multiple dimensions, in concert, to actually take advantage of market opportunity and customer demand. And on this journey, you have to measure where your product team is spending its time to ensure they’re not going in circles. There’s a simple device I like to use for this purpose…

The 4 F’s. Each F has a purpose:

1. features - take 2 steps forward

2. fixes - avoid taking 1 step back

3. foundation - (re)pave the road

4. future - find new/better route(s)

Catchy, right? I stole it from the former head of engineering at Twitter, who stole it from someone else at Salesforce. My contribution was adding an F (it was originally 3 F’s). If you’ve been reading this newsletter, you know I like to break the Rule of 3.

A recent Reforge blog post on the 4 categories of product problems beyond product-market fit (PMF) reminded me of this. They use a slightly different (better articulated, less catchy) framework:

1. feature work (aka features)

2. growth work (aka fixes)

3. scaling work (aka foundation)

4. PMF expansion (aka future)

Whatever mental model you prefer, the meta-point is to measure where a product team’s output is directed and discuss whether that drives the desired outcomes.

I’d love to hear about other ways readers think about bucketing product work - please chime in via the comments feature below👇🏾. Pile on even if you don’t believe in PMF, as I sometimes do

ibrahim @ibscribe

around the 25 min mark of this podcast episode @aprildunford rips the idea of product-market fit a new one - legit points on the concept being valuable to external parties looking to invest in a sure-thing business, but not very useful for those internally running the business

Chris Buttenham @chrisbuttenham

New episode of @theaotfpodcast .. this time feat. @alexsopinka 👀 We got the pleasure of chatting with @aprildunford about product positioning and failure. She made a really interesting point about grieving your failures.. https://t.co/lq8MlOcLtN

And if you enjoyed this post, please consider subscribing!

---

further reading / references

• the Rule of 3 as a communication framing construct

• Reforge on product work beyond product-market fit

• good listen (AotF podcast) on the non-existence of PMF

• the story of how PayPal went “sharp” to find PMF

---

childish drawing / interpretation