Product Management Principles

Core Philosophy

1. Hypothesis Until Proven: Every assumption is a hypothesis until validated with evidence. Treat unvalidated ideas as hypotheses, not facts
2. Value Traceability: Preserve the links needed to connect a decision or implementation back to its supporting outcome and evidence
3. Proportionate Validation: Use cost x risk x reversibility to determine sufficient confidence
4. Proportionate Artifacts: Keep durable decisions in repo artifacts when a downstream consumer will reuse them; no-change and reuse are valid outcomes

Opportunity Solution Tree (OST) Hierarchy

Use this hierarchy to distinguish outcomes, opportunities, solutions, assumptions, and experiments when those distinctions affect the current decision:

Outcome
  ├── Product Outcome (team-controllable product goals)
  │     NSM connects Product Outcome ↔ Business Outcome
  └── Business Outcome (business results Product Outcome contributes to)

Product Outcome
  └── Opportunity (user problems, needs, desires)
        └── Solution (approaches to address the opportunity = feature candidates)
              └── Assumption (premises underlying the solution = hypotheses)
                    └── Experiment (methods to validate the hypothesis)

Level Definitions

4 Risks (Authoritative Definition)

A user story is the minimum unit of value. Consider all four risks and gather enough evidence for the dimensions that can change the delivery decision:

• Value — Will users use/buy this? Does it solve their problem?
• Usability — Can users figure out how to use it? Does the UX work?
• Feasibility — Can we build it technically? Is the effort realistic?
• Viability — Does it work as a business? Can we explain why we're building it?

Confidence Meter (Authoritative Definition)

Track confidence per risk dimension (0-10):

Threshold by Cost x Risk x Reversibility

PRDs show current confidence and remaining risks at the smallest scope that changes a delivery decision. Keep shared evidence and decisions at feature scope.

Knowledge Pyramid (Authoritative Definition)

Knowledge is organized in three tiers to manage context as hypotheses accumulate:

Tier 1 learnings are corroborated patterns that remain useful across the contexts where they will guide decisions.

Distillation criteria (enforced by knowledge-distiller):

• Independent corroboration: Independent evidence supports the learning across its intended decision scope
• Context coverage: Supporting contexts match the scope where the learning will guide decisions
• Contradiction handling: Conflicting evidence is retained with the conditions that explain its decision effect
• Freshness: Revalidate when source age or changed conditions can alter a current decision

State Design (Authoritative Definition)

For each user-facing interaction, define the states that can occur and affect its acceptance. The categories below are a reference set, not a required checklist:

PRDs and prototypes cover the states needed to define or validate the current interaction. Record an exclusion only when its absence could obscure the acceptance or validation decision.

Key Principles for Daily Decisions

• 3+ Solutions Test: Use the ability to identify meaningfully different Solutions as a diagnostic for whether an Opportunity is framed too narrowly. A failed diagnostic is a framing signal, not an obligation to manufacture alternatives. See references/opportunity-template.md for Opportunity file structure
• Business Outcome Traceability: Preserve the connection to business outcomes while using NSM to balance metric pressure
• Design is a Perspective, Not a Phase: Design thinking applies across all processes — discovery, validation, definition, delivery, and reflection
• Cycle, Not Phases: Discovery → Validation → Definition → Delivery → Reflection is a continuous cycle. Start from anywhere
• MVP Scoping: When transitioning validated hypotheses to PRD, use references/mvp-definition.md for prioritization (MoSCoW/RICE) and scope reduction techniques