20/20 Vision – Innovation Game in Action

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Having an outside-in bias as a product manager is important – you need to understand how your customers (or your customer’s customers) would value capabilities you might build into your product. When running a workshop to collect that information, playing some “serious games” is a great way to get more […]

Don’t Prioritize Features!

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Estimating the “value” of features is a waste of time. I was in a JAD session once where people argued about if the annoying beeping (audible on the conference line) was a smoke alarm or a fire alarm. Yes, you can get to an answer, but so what?! The important […]

Is Your Product Improving?

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Do you recognize this early logo from Amazon.com? Future Now has a great article detailing how Amazon evolved their “add to shopping cart” implementation. From reviewing this summary of the evolution of one feature, we can see that Amazon decided there was value in reinvention. The improved the way their […]

Stakeholder Value-Delivery Matrix

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Roger Burlton, of the Process Renewal Group, gave an excellent presentation Monday morning at the 10th annual International Business Rules Group: Developing a Business Process Architecture and Program of Change. A lot of good stuff about how to define, develop, and manage processes. One idea in his presentation was particularly […]

Why Prioritization Matters

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I am a big fan of boxes and arrows, but this time, Jeffrey Davidson found a great article by Dan Willis before I did, and told me about it. Thanks Jeffrey! The article is about how to deal with the what and how of requirements and design – and it […]

Prioritization and Value Maximization

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We all know the story about the emperor’s new clothes. I’ve been thinking about prioritization and scheduling, and as far as I know, no one is promoting that we maximize value – they (and we) have been promoting that we do the most valuable stuff first. Doing the most valuable […]

APR: Process Deviation?

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Rolf presented a valid critique and some questions on our previous article announcing the launch of nexus. I started writing a long response, and realized it would work well as an article for analysis of our process over the last month. Here it is.