Most of the teams I’ve helped either didn’t use problem statements, or didn’t use them well. Without improving, they spend more time and money than needed to build things, and much of what they build is worthless or wasted.
Requirements / Requirements Models / Uncategorized / User Stories
Posted on:
Shifting from Tasks to User Stories
Helping teams to shift from a task-focus to writing user stories requires a different approach than simply introducing user stories as a new tool. You have to adapt the existing practices, by changing how teams think about and discuss the work they do. “Change from…” is different for people than […]
Agile / Product Management / User Stories
Posted on:
How To Make Your Product Special
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
Posted on:
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
Posted on:
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
Posted on:
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
Posted on:
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
Posted on:
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
Posted on:
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 […]