Product Kata

Product Kata Core

A free operating model for commercial success.

Product Kata Core is our agentic operating model for product management: what a B2B product company must be able to do, from strategy to the commercial life of the product, with the handbooks, templates and agents to do it. Free to use, and published in the open.

The product operating model of Product Kata Core in brief: three operating areas, strategy and portfolio, product management and product enablement, each with the names of its capabilities, 29 in all, Baseline and Situational marked.

The product operating model is live, and so is the benchmark. The model sets out three operating areas and 29 capabilities, end to end. The benchmark shows how it compares with eight established frameworks, and where it takes a different view. Next, we add the practices, one by one: the how-to behind each capability.

Explore the operating model
See the benchmark

The Product Kata manifesto

Product management is a commercial job.

Most frameworks teach a part of the job: discovery, delivery, team design. Few teach how to make a business out of a product. Our manifesto sets out the ten principles Product Kata Core is built on, and the six promises it makes back to you. It is short, it takes a position, and it is written for product leaders who want their work to show in the numbers.

Read it, argue with it, and take the principles that fit your context.

Read the manifesto
The Product Kata manifesto: ten principles for product leaders, starting with: You win by changing how your customer works.
Product Kata Core's handbooks, templates and agents, turned into a company's own playbooks.

What we are working on now

  • The agentic operating model. The reference model is live. Next come the practices behind each capability, written so that people and agents can run them together.
  • The first handbooks and agents. A handbook explains a practice; an agent works through it with you, asking the questions a good colleague would ask and explaining again as often as you need.
  • Working in the AI tools you already use. Our target is that Product Kata Core runs in several AI tools, not only one.
  • Real workflows, not only documents. We build Core by running it. The Core pages on this site were written and published by Core’s own agents, through the workflows they describe.

We publish as we go. Follow along and get each practice as it lands.

Newsletter

Follow Product Kata Core as it grows.

One short email a month: what we have published, and what we are building next.


Free to use. See Using Product Kata Core.