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 […]
Communication
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Is Your Process Your Purpose?
A common suggestion from product development teams when asked how to improve their working environment, is to “spend less time in meetings.” I’ve felt this way personally when I was writing code – I just wanted to get back to it. I don’t believe I’ve worked with an organization where […]
Product Management / Uncategorized
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Intuition Enables Problem Solving
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.
Agile / Product Management / Transformation / Uncategorized
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Orienting to Value
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.
Agile / Organizations / Product Management / Product Strategy
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Epic Problem Statement
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 […]
Product Management
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Motivated Reasoning and Validating Hypotheses
In our continuing series on managing the risk in your backlog, we look at the risk of kidding ourselves. Specifically, we use cause and effect and hypotheses to identify the assumptions in our plans, but if we don’t do it the right way, we will lie to ourselves by validating […]
Product Management
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Cause & Effect and Product Risk
When deciding how to invest in your product, you need to take into account the risks that your investments will not return the outcomes you desire. One class of risks is business risk, and in product management we can influence the business risk of invalid intentionality – what I could […]
Business Analysis / Kano Analysis / Marketing / Prioritization / Product Management / Product Strategy / Requirements / Requirements gathering / Requirements Models
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Market Problem Framing Example
As Steven Haines first told me, “strategy first, roadmap second.” There is a step between the two – deciding which problems you will focus on solving with your product. Strategy defines the context for product strategy, and your product roadmap is a planning (and communication) tool for executing your product […]
Personas / Product Management / UX
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Progressively Elaborated Users
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.