A picture is worth a thousand words. A prototype is worth a thousand lines of code. Two key elements of product management – and of agile development are elicitation and feedback. Low fidelity artifacts can significantly improve both. Polished, codified prototypes can create problems that prevent you from getting the […]
Cadence Versus Risk
I’ve been thinking about the software development process. Big, upfront, design and requirements. User research and analysis. Market insights, gained on exploration or over time. Release cadence – how quickly you get, and incorporate, feedback from your customers about your product. How quickly you react to your competitors’ reactions to […]
Is Your Market Fragmented or Concentrated?
Market concentration – or fragmentation – is an important big picture view of your market. Insights into the nature of competition for your customers will help you make decisions about your product. But only if you correctly define your market.
Use Cases for Iterative Development
Almost everything I’ve read about use cases focuses on describing what needs to be added to your product. Agile development says “get it working first, make it better second.” That means changing the way the software enables a user to do something they can already do. How do you manage […]
Bad Product or Bad Positioning? Intel’s Unlockable CPU
Intel introduced the G6951 unlockable CPU consumer product this month. Most of the press has been critical. Is this new chip / upgrade process a bad product, or a good product with bad positioning?
Passionate Requirements
Writing passionate requirements is not about writing with passion. It is about writing the requirements that cause people to be passionate about your product. Find the most important problem, for your most important customers. Understand the essence of what is important to solve that problem, for only those people. Then […]
Customer-Centric Market Model
A market can be thought of as the collection of contexts in which you might sell your product. You can split your market into a set of market segments. Each of those segments represents a group of customers, each of whom shares a set of problems for which they would […]
Atomic Requirements
Each requirement you write represents a single market need, that you either satisfy or fail to satisfy. A well written requirement is independently deliverable and represents an incremental increase in the value of your software. That is the definition of an atomic requirement. Read on to see why atomic requirements […]
Sprint Backlog – Don’t Solve Half of the Problem
Every team that transitions to agile faces this problem – some stories are too big to fit in a single sprint. Most of the teams that I have worked with have the wrong instinct – to solve half of the problem for all users. The right approach is to first […]