Become a Product Rockstar
In his groundbreaking product management book, Daniel Thulfaut takes you through valuable lessons and strategies he learned working on award-winning teams with some of the biggest companies in the world, including Porsche, DHL, Continental, and Sennheiser. Learn the skills that will transform your PM career, and pick up a copy of From Vision to Version today!
Your benefits from this
What will you learn from this in-depth guide to product management?
Product Management coach Daniel Thulfaut brings his 17+ years of industry experience in this powerful guide. Inside From Vision to Version, you’ll gain valuable insights into what it means to succeed with brands like:
Pick Up Your Copy of From Vision to Version Today!
I will lay out the complete process with templates and checklists and give you everything you need to be a product strategy rockstar.
From Vision To Version – available as ebook.
From Vision to Version
What’s inside the book?
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Chapter 01
Introduction
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Chapter 02
About this book
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Chapter 03
The holy trinity
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Chapter 04
Crafting your vision
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Chapter 05
Anatomy of strategy
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Chapter 06
Outcome focussed roadmaps
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Chapter 07
Shaping a roadmap theme
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Chapter 08
Process & Leadership
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Chapter 09
The Product Manifesto
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Chapter 10
What now?
The good news is, bringing a great vision to life and drastically changing the odds of product success is something you can learn, and that can be repeated.
In this book, I will teach you all the steps you need to connect the dots between vision and version and enable teams to build products users love and buy.
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Why you need a strategy process framework
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Why I am the right coach to guide you
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What to expect from this book
This book sets out to provide this strategy process and everything that you need to create incredible product strategies - again and again, and again.
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Why should you read this book?
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What is in it for non-product people?
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What is in it for developers?
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How the book is structured
To realize this massive impact, all product teams, startup or corporate, need to have three levels of guiding, which I call the holy trinity of product management: The vision, the strategy and the roadmap.
This chapter is crucial for you if you recognize yourself, your product, or your organization in these situations:
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You don’t have a product vision, strategy and roadmap or can’t tell the difference.
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Most discussions in your team are focussed on process and less on your product.
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Your strategy describes a wild fantasy about the future and what mission your company is on.
When you look at job offerings in product management and search for the word „vision“, there is a good chance you will find it in most, if not all, vacancies. Product Managers are required to „have a great sense of vision & strategy“, „be strong communicators able to align teams to a shared vision“ and „think both visionary and strategic“. Still, many product managers have never actually created a proper product vision.
This chapter is crucial for you if you recognize yourself, your product, or your organization in these situations:
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Your product idea is built around technology rather than a user’s problem.
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You can’t exactly tell how much you progressed towards your vision with your last release.
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You want to compete on every segment and feature with your competitors and have not chosen a very distinct value proposition.
Product Strategy is less about what you want to achieve but more about the how and why. So how exactly are you planning to journey towards your product vision? And why is this plan currently the best way to go?
Your product strategy is the glue between your product vision and your operative work.
This chapter is crucial for you if you recognize yourself, your product, or your organization in these situations:
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With every arising crisis and problem, you rather hold board meetings and team discussions than consult your strategy document.
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Your strategy is very high level and visionary, and you need to regularly explain why you work on stuff to your colleagues.
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Most decisions of your strategy are based on gut feelings and assumptions rather than in-depth market research and idea validation.
Even if you are still new to product management and digital products in general, you are probably familiar with the concept of roadmaps. A roadmap is basically just a linear plan and timeline for your product. It details what you are planning to work on and when these work packages should be ready. Some roadmaps outline the next quarter, and some reach several years into the future. The sad truth is that roadmaps are the most commonly used planning technique in software development and also the least useful one.
This chapter is crucial for you if you recognize yourself, your product, or your organization in these situations:
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Your roadmap contains features and deadlines for more than a few months.
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Your success is measured by the number of features delivered and being on schedule.
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You work in two-week sprints because the Scrum guy told you so.
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You are not always working on discovery projects alongside your development and delivery.
One thing a lot of product managers struggle with is writing good roadmap or backlog items. Some try to nail the specification upfront and produce multi-page requirement documents and screen mockups of every possible state. Others try to wing it by sticking to the basic user story formula and avoid getting too detailed. There is a sweet spot between these extremes.
This chapter is crucial for you if you recognize yourself, your product, or your organization in these situations:
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Your backlog is hard to read because every item starts with “As a user I want…”
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You spend your time working on detailed screens for every possible state instead of shipping value and researching your next strategy.
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Your acceptance criteria are spot on - yet nobody knows why that feature is actually being developed.
Regardless of hierarchy, management and leadership (which are not the same) focus mainly on three things: purpose, process, and people.
This chapter is crucial for you if you recognize yourself, your product or your organization in these situations:
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You only work on strategy and vision if something huge (good or bad) happens.
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You are growing and find it challenging to scale your product management team and their responsibilities.
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You follow a well-known process framework without tailoring that process to your specific needs.
The cornerstone of agile methodologies like Scrum is the Agile Manifesto.
Unfortunately, the Agile Manifesto (and, for that matter, also most of the actual process frameworks) falls short in regard to adding value specifically to product management.
We need a Product Management Manifesto on top of the Agile Manifesto. We need values and principles that guide us on our journey to define the right product.
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The four product centric values
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10 product management principles
Congratulations! By now, you should know everything you need for crafting incredible strategies, aligning everyone around a shared and user-centric vision and how to transform all this into tangible, shipped software.
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Where to go from here?
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Where to start?
Book Reviews
What readers are saying
"Made me rethink our vision immediately. It is so much clearer now and I can feel how my team is more committed to this shared purpose. Great read!"
Steve Segoviano
"Awesome tips and insights! Just one gold nugget after the other... "
Sabrina Dietzler
"From vision to version is one of the best books on product management I have read in a long time. Highly recommended! The strategy blueprint alone is worth the price."
Antonino Melander
"If you are unsure about how to improve or build your strategy - this is the book for you! Read it cover to cover in one session and could apply it instantly."
Fabian Perelman
"Absolutely on point! We have always been too busy to think about strategy. Now we have more focus than ever and prioritize ruthlessly. Five stars!"
Jaquelin Stem
"Easy read with great humor. I've been a product owner for almost a decade but still learned a few really cool new approaches."
Stefan Schulte
From Vision to Version
About the author
Daniel Thulfaut
Daniel is the type of Product Manager building products like an entrepreneur - solving their users’ actual job-to-be-done with the most pragmatic solution possible.
Born and raised in Germany, Daniel - to this day - is the youngest founder his home region ever had. At age 15, he registered and built his first business as a designer and developer for web-based products. His early track record of building great web solutions led him to join award-winning brand studio Interactive Pioneers as Head of Project Management in 2010 - serving prestigious brands like Porsche, DHL, Continental and Sennheiser as young as 21.
Since then, Daniel acquired experience as an Agile coach, Product Manager and CTO (Chief Technology Officer), working at hidden-champions and international powerhouses in almost every sector. His superiors admire him for his pragmatism and for his outstanding effectiveness in solving client’s challenges with his products. Teams and clients follow Daniel’s lead for how he translates product visions into sound, pragmatic product strategies that are easy to understand and to implement - laying the ground for great successes as a product team and a product organization.
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Meet the experts
Insightful articles from the industry's finest
“I’ve gathered some of the best content from product managers across various sectors that have infused my groundbreaking book with added value. Not only do you gain the benefit of my personal experience, but you get some of the most incredible knowledge valuable from these brilliant PMs.”
Don’t forget all the tiny human actions that are part of every grand thing
What Strategy Development & Poker have in Common
How multi-level roadmaps drive success for internet-of-things products
Why it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place
I got 99 problems, but strategy ain’t one
What if you don’t offer a quarterly roadmap, and your stakeholders will love it?
How to prioritize on the initiative, opportunity, and solution level
Nobody is an island. We cannot build products alone.
Rapid prototyping product ideas with no-code
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