Put me in a room with a whiteboard and some post-its (digital or real), and let’s get a little crazy.

I love facilitating workshops to unleash the creativity of my colleagues. Big bet or small win, I start brainstorming the same way — pull user insights, jobs to be done, and pain points alongside business KPIs and constraints on a whiteboard, and let your imagination run. Rinse & repeat.

Tools: Figjam, Miro, pencil & paper

I’m a sucker for data, and I use it as early and often as I can. Each project is different, but a healthy mix of desk research, user interviews, and analytics usually does the trick.

Minimize risk. Understand users’ expectations and mental models. Confirm what you thought, and expose the things you hadn’t considered yet. For something that unlocks so much value in any project, data is often the most misused tool in a Product toolbox.

Tools: Tableau, Mixpanel,

Now that we’ve got our opportunity mapped and vetted, it’s time to shape the plan of attack.

Sometimes, that means starting a robust living document articulating everything from the high-level goals to the deepest details of how a feature works. Sometimes it’s throwing together a few flows in Figma and iterating ‘til it hurts. Sometimes it means throwing some foundational decision post-it’s on a War Room whiteboard and building around it. The methods are endless.

But the goal? Let’s apply a little rigor to our collective imaginations. Let’s bring this thing to life.

I’m no artist, but I can do boxes and arrows like a sonofagun.

This is about efficiency, not artistry. If I need to communicate an idea, I can spend 20 minutes trying to describe it and watch my colleagues’ eyes glaze over…or I can make a wireframe or a sketch and it just clicks. It’s not pretty, but it gets the job done.

Oh hey, just me talking about data again! Frankly, I don’t think you can do good work without it.

There are a thousand ways to capture data, but once you have it, you need to put it to work. Every good product strategy should have a plan for data capture to fuel a feedback loop and inform future optimizations. Without it, you’re sitting on a treasure chest with no key.