S.P.A.C.E.
The SPACE framework is used for measuring, understanding, and improving product team productivity across five dimensions: satisfaction, performance, activity, communication, and efficiency.
Product roadmap
A product roadmap is a visual plan that outlines the steps and timeline for developing a product, showing what will be done and when.
Customer interviews
Customer Interviews is a research practice where product teams conduct structured conversations with users to understand their needs, pain points, and behaviors.
Product Requirement Doc
PRD (Product Requirements Document) is a detailed blueprint that defines a product's purpose, features, and success criteria to align stakeholders and guide development.
Slow delivery
One of the most common issues in product teams. Teams are moving too slowly, causing frustration inside and competitors to catch up. If you’re not going to fix it, You’re going to have a bad time.
No product impact
No product impact means that the product or feature created does not result in any measurable change or improvement to the customer experience or business outcomes.
Technology Radar
A Technology Radar is a visual tool that helps teams track and evaluate emerging technologies, showing which ones to adopt, hold, or avoid based on their relevance and maturity.
Company mission
Company mission answers why do you exist as a company.
Product Vision
Product vision tells a story about how would you like your product to look like in 3-5 years.
Customer centricity
Your customers are your business therefore, obsessing over them must be at the core of your culture in order to succeed.
Prototypes
Prototypes are early models or samples of a product that allow teams to test ideas, gather feedback, and make improvements before final production.
A/B tests
A/B tests involve comparing two versions of a product to determine which one performs better based on specific metrics.
Feature Factory
A feature factory describes a product development approach focused solely on delivering a high volume of features, often at the expense of user needs and overall product quality.
Team Topologies
Team Topologies is an approach for organizing people in tech companies into effective teams. Most known for introducing four team types and three interaction modes, it aims to reduce team dependencies and manage cognitive load.
Product Trio
Product Trio is a product team leadership group consisting of three critical roles to deliver high-quality products: a product manager, a designer, and a tech lead.
High technical debt
High Technical Debt is a state of your technical systems where accumulated shortcuts, outdated code, and quick fixes significantly slow down development and increase maintenance costs.
Competent Product Managers
Competent product managers excel at guiding product teams by balancing customer needs, market trends, and business goals to create successful products.
Transformation roadmap
A transformation roadmap is a step-by-step plan guiding an organization through major changes, showing the phases and actions needed for success.
Expectations agreement workshop
Expectation Agreement is a workshop method that allows having an honest conversation about the expectations between two people and how they see success behind their roles.
OKR
OKR, or Objectives and Key Results, is a goal-setting framework that helps teams define clear objectives and track measurable outcomes to ensure alignment and progress.
Empowered Teams
Empowered Autonomous Teams can decide what to build to solve they problem they're being assigned, without any excessive oversight.
Distrust between teams
Distrust between tech and business teams happens when these groups don't communicate well, leading to misunderstandings and slowed project progress.
Double Diamond
Double Diamond is a design process with four phases: Discover, Define, Develop, and Deliver, to solve problems creatively.
Pirate metrics (AARRR)
Pirate metrics (AARRR) is a framework for tracking user Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue in product.
Stream-aligned teams
Stream-aligned are responsible for delivering direct product value to users and customers by working on certain value stream.
ICE prioritization
ICE prioritization is a framework for ranking ideas based on their Impact, Confidence, and Ease of implementation.
Principles over process
Principle over process emphasizes the importance of adhering to core values and guidelines rather than rigidly following procedures.
Three team interaction modes
Team interaction modes (as defined in Team Topologies) define three ways teams can interact with each other – collaboration, X-as-a-Service, facilitating.
Product Strategy
Product strategy provides the logical sequence of big bets (projects, value streams) that will take you to Product Vision.
High customer churn
High customer churn is when many customers stop using a product or service over a short period, indicating issues with satisfaction or value.
Strategic Pyramid
Strategic Pyramid documents your entire strategy (Mission → Vision → North Star → Strategy → Goals → Roadmap).
Too many team dependencies
Too many team dependencies can slow progress, as teams must wait for each other to complete tasks before moving forward.
True product designers
True Product Designers are creative problem-solvers who combine user research, design expertise, and business strategy to craft meaningful products.
Innovation over predictability
Innovation over predictability emphasizes the value of creative, novel solutions over routine, predictable outcomes in product development.
Domain-Driven Design (DDD)
Domain-Driven Design is a software development approach that emphasizes understanding the business domain to create a shared model, ensuring the software aligns with user needs and goals.
Limited team autonomy
Your teams have no decisions about what they’re building or even how they’re building. They seek approval for most things.
Feature toggles
Feature toggles are switches in code that allow developers to enable or disable specific functionalities of a product without deploying new code.
Product goals
Product goals provide targets on the list of metrics product team is asked to achieve.
Cross-functional teams
Cross-functional teams are teams permanently containing all roles necessary to deliver product work without relying on different teams. Typically that’s PM, Designer, Tech Lead and engineers.
Low transparency
Low transparency means people don’t know what product teams are working on, and whether they’re generating impact or not.
Low innovation
Low innovation means that a company fails to deliver new features or improvements that meet customer needs, leading to decreased satisfaction and loyalty.
North Star metric
The North Star metric is a single KPI that directly reflects the core value a product delivers to its customers.
Core company values
Core company values are the key beliefs and principles that guide how a company and its team operate and make decisions.
Small (Pizza) Teams
Small (Pizza) teams are cross-functional groups of around 5-8 people who work together closely on a project, promoting quick decision-making and effective collaboration.
Failed transformations
Failed transformations occur when attempts to adapt or improve a product or process result in setbacks or do not achieve the desired outcomes.
Enabling teams
Enabling teams help other teams (typically stream-aligned teams) with some expertise, for example adopting new technology.
Low employee motivation
Low employee motivation occurs when team members lack enthusiasm and drive to effectively contribute to product development efforts.
Platform teams
Platform teams serve stream-aligned teams. They offer essential services, tools, and infrastructure for other teams to deliver work with high autonomy.
Team Charter
Team charter defines team mission statement, value stream they’re working on, their KPI list and the services they’re owning.
Communication issues
The most common issues within the organization. You probably won’t be able to get rid of this, once you have a scale, but you can (and should) try to fight it as hard as possible.
Stable teams
Teams that remain stable (do not change people because project change) for at least 6 months.
Manager’s README
A manager’s readme is a document where managers share their leadership style, expectations, and how they prefer to communicate with their team.
High cognitive load
High cognitive load means that the team has too many things on their shoulders, making them slower to move or to think.
Value streams
Value stream is a mid-to-long-lived area of work that company find valueable. It could be a problem, it could be persona, it could be market segment.
Onboarding checklist
An onboarding checklist is a list of tasks and steps to help new employees get settled, learn about the company, and understand their role effectively.
Trust over control
“Trust over control” principle emphasizes empowering teams with autonomy and decision-making authority, fostering a culture of trust rather than stringent control.
Balanced metric scorecard
A balanced metric scorecard is a tool that helps teams measure performance across different areas, ensuring a well-rounded view of success.
Keeper test
Keeper Test is a leadership practice where managers regularly evaluate if they would fight to keep a team member if they resigned tomorrow.
DORA metrics
DORA metrics are a set of indicators measuring deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, and time to restore service in software delivery.
Opportunity Solution Tree
An Opportunity Solution Tree is a visual tool that helps teams explore all potential solutions to a customer problem and choose the most effective one.
Visiontype
Visiontype is a visual representation of product’s idealized future state.
Jobs to Be Done (JTBD)
Jobs to be Done is a framework that helps teams understand what tasks (jobs) customers want to accomplish, focusing on their goals and needs to create better products and services.
Performance Improvement Plan
A Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) is a formal process used to help employees improve their work performance by setting specific goals, providing feedback, and outlining support measures.
Team health checks
Team health checks are repeated assessments used to measure the performance and well-being of a team over time.
Event Storming
Event Storming brings together diverse team members to map out business processes and domain events using sticky notes on a timeline, speeding up knowledge sharing.
Communities of practice (guilds)
Community of practice (sometimes called guilds) groups members of specific specialization (for example: frontend, backend, product design) and provides standards and best-practices for the discipline.
Design system
A design system is a collection of reusable components, guidelines, and standards that helps teams create consistent and user-friendly products efficiently.
Complicated-subsystem teams
The complicated subsystem teams own systems and services that require specialist knowledge, such as mathematical models, face-recognition engines, trading algorithms, NLP Engines, etc.
Inner sourcing
Inner sourcing is the practice of using open-source methods within an organization, allowing teams to collaborate and share code or resources across departments to improve efficiency and innovation.
Insights repository
Insights repository is a centralized collection of customer feedback, market research, and user data that informs product decisions and helps teams identify opportunities for improvement.
