Learn How to Drive Business Impact

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I’m excited to be joining my friend Jon Harmer, Lead Product Manager at Google, in teaching Product Mangers how to drive business impact. In our cohort-based class on Dec 2-3, 2023, with live instruction and hands-on work, we will teach the critical practices to being effective at meeting customer needs […]

A Better Problem Statement Template

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To improve how you build products, you need to write problem statements defining which problems you intend to solve. This helps your thinking, shapes your strategy, and creates purpose for your people. Writing your problem statements with a good template makes this easier.

Shifting from Tasks to User Stories

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Helping teams to shift from a task-focus to writing user stories requires a different approach than simply introducing user stories as a new tool. You have to adapt the existing practices, by changing how teams think about and discuss the work they do. “Change from…” is different for people than […]

Intuition Enables Problem Solving

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The shift from inside-out to outside-in is necessary to become more effective as a product development organization. We cannot build it and (expect) they will come. Here’s how to think about shifting from simply creating outputs to actually solving problems.

Orienting to Value

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Orienting to value – every team, every person does it differently.  How you orient to value limits how much value you can create.  People with a naive orientation can only scratch the surface, cogs in someone else’s machine; those with a refined orientation to value, well, there is no limit to what they can do.

Why Write Requirements

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There is a lot of advice out there for how to write requirements. There is not as much discussion about why to write requirements. Spend some time thinking about why you write requirements before you make decisions about how to write your requirements.

Is Agile Really Cheaper?

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There are several ways to answer the question “is agile cheaper than waterfall?” Here are two of my favorites: “It depends. Agile done well is cheaper, as long as you measure correctly.” “You’re asking the wrong question. The right question is: is agile better?”

Cargo Cult Requirements

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Is your team focusing on the mechanics of creating good software, without understanding the connections from your efforts to your goals? Are you primarily focused on the structure of use cases, the syntax of user stories, and the cardinality of your domain diagrams? All of these things are important to […]

Why Do Products Fail? – Ignoring Context

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Wrapping up the your product failed because you didn’t enable your users to realize value branch of the root causes of product failure, is this article on the context in which your user is using your product. If you ignore your user’s context, they won’t be able to realize the […]