Announcing Product Cards - A Game Changer for Tech Teams

A 100+ cards to learn and improve all things product, engineering, agile, and design in fun and engaging way.

As leaders and managers, we face many challenges in our daily work.

The most common questions we need to answer are:

• Which problems to solve first?

• Which solutions will solve our problems?

• How to convince the stakeholders to listen to us?

• How to improve communication and collaboration in our organization?

• How to prioritize ideas worth building?

• How to innovate and increase the value of our work?

• How to measure and improve the performance of our teams?

• How to create and execute a strategy to take us to the next level?

• How to align our teams in one direction?

• How to attract talent and retain good people in our teams?

Wouldn’t it be great if you had answers in your pocket?

That’s what Product Cards can do for you. It’s 100+ cards to learn and improve all things product, engineering, agile, and design.

What are Product Cards?

Product Cards is a curated set of 100+ cards to help you improve your teams.

Those cards describe 20+ most common challenges and 80+ best practices to overcome them.

They cover all areas from product, design, engineering, agile, management, and leadership to culture.

You can use them solo or in your teams to learn, discuss and improve your ways of working. All at your fingertips.

It’s like having a personal advisor in your pocket to help you build successful, high-performing teams and organizations.

Here is a 2-minutes demo of Product Cards:

They’re a combination of 20 years of my experience working with different companies and practices used by like-minded leaders from successful tech companies, like:

Product Cards come in two forms:

1. Digital

2. Physical (coming soon)

Why I Created Product Cards

I made Product Cards because I saw many tech teams struggling to keep up with best practices, especially during scaling moments.

There are many resources out there, but they're scattered, lengthy, hard to follow, and apply in your teams.

Product Cards is possibly the most extensive collection of industry best practices that help you and your team work better.

How Do Product Cards Work?

Physical version of Product Cards

Currently, Product Cards contains three types of cards:

1. Hero Cards

2. Challenge Cards

3. Solution Cards

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1️⃣ Hero Cards

The first type of card is Hero Card.

Hero Cards represent key actors in product companies:

• company leaders

• team leaders and managers

• engineering leaders and managers

• product leaders, product managers, product owners, and growth hackers

• design leaders and managers

• agile coaches, scrum masters, and lean practitioners

• individual contributors who want to improve their teams

All of those roles can directly benefit from using Product Cards.

You can identify Hero Cards by a yellow border around them.

Picking Hero Cards provides you with recommendations for two other types of cards:

1. Challenge Cards representing the most common problems a role may be facing

2. Solutions Cards representing solutions to overcome those challenges

2️⃣ Challenge Cards

The second type of card is Challenge Card.

Challenge Card represent one challenge - a specific problem to solve or an opportunity to seize.

You can identify Challenge Cards by a red border around them.

Challenge Card - Improving Your Team Performance

Example Challenge Cards:

• Setting the Right Team Structure

• Measuring and Improving Your Team Performance

• Increasing the Value Your Teams Are Delivering

• Increasing the Speed of Your Teams

• Managing Tech Debt

• Creating Strategy

• Prioritizing Your Roadmap

• Managing Technology Roadmap

The back side of each Challenge Card provides links to Solution Cards that help you to overcome the challenge. Additionally, each Challenge Card has a QR code that provides a detailed guide on solving your problem.

3️⃣ Solution Cards

The third type of card is Solution Card.

Each Solution Card represents one practice to adopt in your teams.

Solutions Cards help you solve problems represented by Challenge Cards. If you played any trading card game, think of Solution Cards as the cards countering “monster” Challenge Cards.

You can identify Solution Cards by the elixir icon in the upper part of the card. They have different colors, depending on their rarity.

Legendary Solution Card

Example Solution Cards:

• SPACE framework (helps to overcome the “Measuring Your Team Performance” challenge card)

• Product vision (helps to overcome the “Increase your team focus” challenge card)

• ICE roadmap prioritization framework (helps to overcome the ”Increase the value of product teams” challenge card)

• Team Topologies (helps to overcome the “Setting the right team structure” challenge card)

Front-side

The front side of each Solution Card will give information on the following:

• What’s the Rarity of the card?

  • Rarity combines the industry popularity of particular practice with how much impact you can expect from adopting it.

  • Rarities used in Product Cards:

    • ⚪️ Common

    • 🟢 Uncommon

    • 🔵 Rare

    • 🟣 Epic

    • 🟠 Legendary

• What’s the estimated impact of adopting this practice from 1-10?

• What’s the estimated effort needed from your team from 1-10?

Back-side

The back side of each Solution Card expands information on the practice. Additionally, each Solution Card has a QR code linking to the Card Guide.

Card Guide

Card Guide is a detailed guide on specific Solution Card practice:

You can find there:

• Necessary information on the practice

• List of companies using this practice

• List of arguments to convince people to adopt the practice

• When to use this practice

• Step-by-step guide on how to apply this practice

• List of Challenge Cards this Solution Card can counter

• List of similar Solution Cards that can help you

• Further reading materials

• Card rarity (explained in the Front-side section)

• The estimated impact of adopting this practice from 1-10

• The estimated effort needed from your team from 1-10

Together they provide you with all the necessary knowledge to learn, convince and adopt the practice.

How to use Product Cards?

There are multiple ways to use Product Cards, either solo or in teams.

You can:

• Brainstorm problems in your teams and find ways to improve in the workshops.

• Use them during one-on-one coaching sessions.

• Use them as your “ace” to convince stakeholders to adopt new ways of working.

• Run team audits using specific cards. Score teams’ practices from 1-5. Rank areas that need the most attention.

• Plan and manage your transformation roadmap using cards.

• Use them to communicate things during team-wide presentations.

• Share your ways of working in job descriptions to attract top talents.

This is just a few ways to use the cards. People who used Product Cards found some really creative ways. :)

Why should you use Product Cards?

Product Cards can help you in lots of different ways, depending on how you use them:

• They will help you grow your career as a leader and manager

  • They will help you learn new things

  • They will help you maximize your impact, get noticed, and get promoted

  • They will help you impress people during a job interview

  • They will help you to switch your career track to management/leadership

• They will help you improve how you work

  • They will help you to improve your teams’ alignment, communication, innovation, and collaboration

  • They will help you convince your stakeholders to use new ways of working

  • They will help you establish a solid product culture

  • They will help you plan and manage organizational change

• They can even help you start your own company

• They can increase your team’s engagement

Product Cards allow you to change how you work and have fun doing it at the same time. And fun is important. It’s so easy to forget to have fun at work.

Think about this - doing things that make us happy boost our energy, motivation, and productivity, leading to better results for you and your teams.

Product Cards are designed with that philosophy in mind.

How to get started with Product Cards?

If you are ready to start your journey with Product Cards:

1. Sign up for free Product Cards early access (digital version) and get access to the preview decks of Heroes, Problem, and Solution Cards.
   
   

2. Join the waitlist for the limited physical version of Product Cards. Five random people will get them for free when they become available later this year.

3. Subscribe to be notified about Product Cards’ development progress and new cards added.
   
   

4. Take this 5-minute survey and tell me what you think about Product Cards and how you would improve them.

5. Share this post with your network and help me spread the word about Product Cards.

So, are you ready to become a legendary tech company?

Let me know in the comments what you think about Product Cards.

What cards would you add to the deck?

Yours, Piotr. 👋