The Impact Area Checklist: A Cognitive Aid For Product Managers

Checklists are amazing

Even highly cognitively capable people – including product managers – can forget to do simple things that they know they should do, and a checklist helps them be more successful. In this episode I share a story from Atul Gawande about a checklist for doctors that has saved thousands of lives – it’s not for product managers – and then I share a checklist that I use to help me make better products.

Links

* The book The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande is fantastic. Full of great and inspiring stories of complicated, difficult, and dangerous situations that were made better by applying good checklists.* An interview with Atul Gawande on the NPR site in which he talks about using checklists.* The list of impact areas I used for the Accept360 product.* Two of my earlier articles about the impact areas checklist idea: Use A List Of Major Impact Areas To Think Through New Features and Automating The Impact Area List* My YouTube video about adding knowledge to your product, called “Help Me Think Better”

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Checklists are amazing

Even highly cognitively capable people – including product managers – can forget to do simple things that they know they should do, and a checklist helps them be more successful. In this episode I share a story from Atul Gawande about a checklist for doctors that has saved thousands of lives – it’s not for product managers – and then I share a checklist that I use to help me make better products.

Links

* The book The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande is fantastic. Full of great and inspiring stories of complicated, difficult, and dangerous situations that were made better by applying good checklists.* An interview with Atul Gawande on the NPR site in which he talks about using checklists.* The list of impact areas I used for the Accept360 product.* Two of my earlier articles about the impact areas checklist idea: Use A List Of Major Impact Areas To Think Through New Features and Automating The Impact Area List* My YouTube video about adding knowledge to your...