Hi, it’s Budi.

Okay, here’s the deal: Moving forward, I’ll write with a more focused topic.

So far, I have been writing the newsletter depending on what’s the hottest topic in my mind. Sometimes I will talk about careers, sometimes executions. And I don’t think that’s a good reading experience for you.

The reason I write this newsletter is not to be another “noise”. We already have too many random posts on Medium and other platforms by various authors.

My goal is to share practical ideas to grow together with you. Therefore, I think it makes sense to go deep into a specific topic. I will still write Shorts that might be irrelevant to the topic I focus on, just to keep the newsletter fun.

Let me know what you think about this direction.

This is a living document to help you browse all posts easily. I will pin it on the homepage to help make it accessible. You can also see this as a roadmap for the upcoming posts I’m working on.

The topic that I’ll be focusing on: Product discovery.

In the next few months, I’ll focus on product discovery—it’s a practice to determine whether your team has a problem worth solving and a solution worth building. It’s how you reduce risk and uncertainty by gaining signals through users. (edited Aug 27, 2022)

Product discovery

Doing a product discovery is a technique to reduce that risk, a lot of products failed, 90% of startups died. However, product discovery is useful if you have a clear strategy and direction about what future you seek to make. You can start by differentiating the outcome and output in your vocabulary. I have mentioned how a field study helped our team to shape the strategy and get buy in from leadership.

If you’re building a zero-to-one product, articulating this 6 components will help your team to understand what to discover. To make it actionable, you can start using this template to reflect.

• Product discovery: Everything you need to know to start

• What is a product discovery and why should you care?

• Outcome vs. outputs

• Framework for defining strategy

• How a field study helped our team to shape a strategy

• Define the opportunity space to achieve the objective

• Principle of product discovery

• Why do products fail?

• Use a PMF narrative as the anchor for your next product discovery

Problem discovery:

• Start defining your audience, job to be done, pain, and workaround

• How to define the target audience?

• How to define the job to be done?

• How do I choose which user pain to focus on?

• Avoid solution jumping

• Listen to users’ problems, not their solutions

• Decision-first research (with template)

• Good vs. bad interview questions

• Research questions vs. interview questions

• A casual setting is the best way to learn

• Problem rundown activity

• Is persona useless?

• Vitamin vs. Painkiller

• Interesting insights vs. Useful insights

• Problem-solving principles

• Ladder of evidence

• No need for the formal research report

Solution discovery:

• Why your product must be different from the competitor?

• Design sprint

• Risk to reduce: Value, feasibility, viability, usability, ethical

• How do you know if your solution works?

Execution

• How to effectively conduct a design review?

• Scope your design work with user stories

• About designing an onboarding experience

• Find time for deep work

• 5 steps to effectively manage your time (with template)

• Organizing information in interface design

• How to scope product design work

• Principles to scope design work

• How writing can help you to think clearly and be more articulated (with example)

• Clear ownership and decision-making with DRI

• On project management

• Dear Budi: What cadences do you run in your team?

• Writing PRD

• Writing user stories

• On sprint planning

Growth

• How to be strategic in designing an onboarding experience?

Mindset, concepts, and principles

• Being a beginner

• Avoid instant culture

• Old friends

• Should you pursue happiness?

• Trust Battery

• Vitamin vs. Painkiller

• Bushido: “Next month, I’ll quit my job”

• Dear Budi: What’s the purpose of being a product practitioner?

Career and growth

• Advice for transitioning to a new job

• Essential skills to enter Product Design

• Community discussion: How to get the first product design job?

• How to get promoted (with template)

• Principles on career advancement

• How to prepare your one-on-one as an individual contributor (template)

• Dear Budi: How to make 30 days onboarding plan?

People management

• How to deal with underperforming employee

• How to give feedback and handle conflict

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With a warm handshake,

Budi 🤝