Software product success.
How do you debate how to build something you’ve been asked to build? There are several constraints which affect choices – non-functional requirements (NFRs), cost, capacity, and capability are easy ones to discuss. And while all of those are relevant, an altogether different factor has dramatically more impact on your […]
When evaluating a product, a customer may see the product as special, adequate, inadequate, or awful. What is uncomfortable for product teams is they have no control over how the customer sees the product. They only have influence. What teams need to learn is how to approach creating the product […]
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.
When solving complex problems at scale, we use epics, features, and stories to align, focus, and coordinate the work of multiple teams to achieve the objectives of our organizations. An epic represents the investment decision to solve a tangible problem; a collection of epics together represent a broader investment decision […]
You may not need a persona right now. But you absolutely must be user-centric. Explore a pragmatic approach to understanding your users – particularly when scaling agile or transforming from waterfall.
The pop-culture concept of a silver bullet – a simple solution to a hard problem – is a dangerous idea. It can be used to over-promise, and doom a team to under-delivery. When an executive, too far removed from what makes creating products hard thinks of “agile” as a silver […]
An organization attempting to use agile processes at scale must be outcome driven – without intentionality the system of delivery breaks down and operates no better than waterfall.
Can one person be both product manager and product owner? With two people, where are the role boundaries? How should you think about it?
Product owners are likely to find themselves alone in the organizational wilderness. Their organizations expect them to connect the towers of long-term strategic planning with the frontiers of great new products. Iterative and incremental development of solutions can bring these two worlds together. There’s always a gap between strategy and […]
