You’ve got a giant backlog of user stories and product capabilities. How do you determine which stories to implement right now? By the estimated value of each story? Pick the ones the developers want to build next? How about picking the stories that maximize the ROI of the sprint? To […]
Agile Product Management: Providing Context
Agile development methodologies succeed because they help development teams be as effective as possible. Development teams do not, however, work in complete isolation. The company they work for has a strategy. The company manages a portfolio of products, and targets a particular product at specific market problems. Within that context, […]
Market Driven Competitive Advantage
Your strategy should be driven by the needs of the market. Becoming market-driven is critical to intentional product success. But it is not enough to understand your market. You have to sustain your understanding, and take advantage of it, competitively.
Good Enough For Now
Adam Bullied wrote a really good article about not losing motivation in the face of challenges. His closing quote spun us off on a philosophical tangent about being “good enough.”
Successful Products: Lucky or Intentional?
Is your product successful because you were lucky, or because you were methodical and intentional? Do you want to build a plan where you are dependent on good fortune, or do you want to make your own “luck?” Both approaches work, but only one makes sense as an intention. Slide […]
Plan For Today, And Plan Correctly For Tomorrow
Instead of Prioritize the present when planning your product. Neglecting the future is almost as bad as over-emphasizing it. The key is to incorporate your plans for the future correctly by making them play second fiddle to the present needs of your market. Serve both today and tomorrow – but […]
Cockburn Affirms: Use Cases Rule for Agile!
We’ve been promoting use cases as the right way to approach agile requirements, and in a recent article, Alistair Cockburn stresses the importance of use cases. Over the last three years, he has found that teams that avoid use cases consistently run into the same three problems. We defer, of […]
Specializing Generalists and the Politics of Agile
A successful agile team requires someone on the team to act as the voice of the customer, someone to lead the developers, someone to lead quality assurance, and someone to organize, coordinate, and assure execution. For an agile team to succeed in an enterprise ripe with political resistance to agile, […]
Agile Absolves Developers
A client at a large company with large development teams and a long history of waterfall development made a comment: “The only people who are talking about doing this project in Agile are developers who think it will allow them to avoid responsibility.” My client may have been right (that […]