I have written recently about how product teams do product discovery in parallel with product delivery. I have also written about how teams sometimes like to time-box their product discovery work. What I’d like to write about in this article...
Recently I was with my friend Jeff Patton, one of the pioneers in applying Agile to product organizations, and he told that he has been advocating the term “Opportunity Backlog” as an alternative to the product roadmap. I have written...
Measuring innovation is a popular topic lately. Many product teams use Product Scorecards to keep their focus on outcomes rather than output. Eric Ries introduced the term “Innovation Accounting” for this purpose as well. However, as much as I like...
A while ago I posted an article on people that I think have something really valuable to say to product leaders. One of those people I discussed was Eric Ries, author of the blog http://www.startuplessonslearned.com. I also promised that I’d...
There are several skills and activities that are important when coming up with great products. In my last article, I argued for the absolute necessity of having good data about how our products are actually being used. But in the...
I work with quite a few product teams, and after a while you start to see patterns. Many organizations are frustrated because they believe that it takes far too long to move from concept to delivery. They often just blame...
Regular readers of this blog know that I’m all about true collaboration, where product leaders, designers and engineers work together to discover products that customers love. Mostly I talk about the process and techniques involved in this, but today I...
Most of my writing is aimed at the product organization, and in helping that organization evolve to where it needs to be to truly serve the needs of the company. I have also written about how the leaders of the...
In my last article I began a series on the product planning process. I wanted to start by emphasizing that the most critical aspect to product planning is to have an effective mechanism for separating the good ideas from the...
No one coming to your website? Company image tired? Business plans changed? It’s time for a rebrand! Or maybe not. Somehow “brand” became magic pixie dust to sprinkle on company problems and make them go away. But you can’t create...
Few words are more dreaded by product managers than being told by engineering: “No more new features! We need to stop and rewrite! Our code base is a mess, it can’t keep up with the number of users, it’s a...
How many times have you seen the situation where a sales rep brings to the CEO a proposal from a prospect that says, “if you will just add these seven features to your product then we’ll buy your software and...
Many product development organizations have been experimenting with what has become known as “Agile Software Development” methods, the most popular of which at the time of this writing is known as “Extreme Programming” (XP) but there are several others including...
