There is a lot of advice out there for how to write requirements. There is not as much discussion about why to write requirements. Spend some time thinking about why you write requirements before you make decisions about how to write your requirements. Why Write Requirements? MORE
What Maturity Means. A product is mature if it has stopped growing: The benefits it creates no longer rise. Instead, they have started to stagnate. In terms of the product life cycle model, the product has left the growth stage and entered maturity, as the following picture shows. MORE
How can Theodore Levitt’s classic Whole Product approach help with defining a product roadmap? I’ve been revisiting his concepts and their use recently, thinking about how to revise them for some exercises I’ve been doing with product teams. Whole Product Game Background. MORE
Understanding your users is critical to developing good products. A “complete” understanding is sometimes required, and always comes at a cost. A contextualized understanding is valuable but less so, and costly but less so. MORE
There are several ways to answer the question “is agile cheaper than waterfall?” ” Here are two of my favorites: “It depends. Agile done well is cheaper, as long as you measure correctly.” ” “You’re asking the wrong question. MORE
Agile is not magical. Changing from a waterfall process to an agile process changes how your team works, and helps eliminate inefficiencies. Adopting an agile process does not let you magically have a more successful product. What makes agile powerful is also makes it dangerous. Triage and Urgency. MORE
You know you’re a product manager when this image causes more than a chuckle. A few random thoughts inspired by this Rorschach test of product management concepts from sunk cost fallacy to intentionality. Hanlon’s Razor. MORE
How do you work with professional services, consulting, field engineers, etc. to make your product better? Do you just treat their inputs as yet another channel for feature requests , or do you engage them as an incredibly potent market-sensing capability? Conversation Starter. MORE
Theodore Levitt may have developed the whole product model to help companies compete more effectively with their products. We wrote about the whole product game based on Mr. Levitt’s work. MORE
How the past can provide context for your future plans. For our recent book, Product Roadmaps Relaunched: How to Set Direction while Embracing Uncertainty (O’Reilly), my co-authors C. Todd Lombardo, Evan Ryan, and I interviewed over 80 practicing product people. MORE
By Ellen Gottesdiener Part 2: 5 Ways to Untangle the Mess In part 1 of this blog, I outlined the confusion between what a Product Manager does and what a Product Owner does. The difference and overlaps between product management and product ownership work illustrated how activities span both strategic and tactical product management. With… Product Strategy MORE
Being “outside-in”, “outcome-based”, and “market-driven” is particularly important for creating successful products. The problem is that just saying the words is not enough to help someone shift their thinking. MORE
Paddy Barrett in Ireland is preparing his Master’s thesis on Product Management and would like to interview (USA) state-side product managers for his primary research. It would be awesome if you could help him, and help us all. My Connection. MORE
Defining and building a good minimum viable product is much harder than it sounds. Finding that “one thing” you can do, which people want, is really about a lot more than picking one thing. MORE
Software as a Service is not a one and done transactional offering. A product or business built on SaaS is built on the subscription model – recurring revenue is half of what drives the business (and valuation). The other half is the rate of growth of that recurring revenue. MORE
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. MORE
Feature Broker and Product Dictator. How do you best lead the stakeholders and development team as the person in charge of the product? One way to answer this question is to avoid unhelpful but common leadership styles. MORE
Fundamentally, product management requires you to assess, synthesize, and prioritize the needs which drive the creation of your product in the context of three main objectives: desirability, viability, and feasibility. While laudable, these objectives are too abstract to be actionable. MORE
Understand and articulate what you’re trying to achieve. This article is a follow-on to my overview article on persuasion tips for product managers.). Every presentation or opportunity for persuasion has a goal, or possibly a few goals. MORE
280 Group CEO and Founder, Brian Lawley, is once again joined by the prominent author, consultant and trainer, Greg Cohen. Greg works for 280 Group and has authored best-selling books such as Agile Excellence for Product Managers, Lean Product Management, and Strategy Excellence for Product Managers. MORE
Perhaps the most sought-after aspect of Public Relations is known as “Earned Media”, i.e. the coverage you get in various media without paying for it. This can be a powerful tool in B2B, but to earn your coverage you’ve got to create something worth publishing. MORE
Throw Out The “Laundry List”. My boss calls me into his office and says that it’s time to create a new product description. “OK,” OK,” I say, not sure what to expect at this new company. He opens a spreadsheet and we start filling in the product requirements. MORE
We hear a lot about building products which are “good enough” or “just barely good enough.” ” How do we know what “good enough” means for our customers? No one really tells us. Different Perspectives of Good Enough. MORE
After a few well-received presentations to senior executives, a few colleagues at my new company asked me, based on the positive effect I got, “Can you give us some tips on persuasion?”. MORE
Three Types of Leadership. Scrum is a simple framework with three roles: product owner, development team, and Scrum Master. Each role provides a distinct type of leadership. As the product owner, you lead the product and are responsible for its overall success. MORE
Your product roadmap is a view of what you are building right now, in the near future, and in the more distant future. Or is your roadmap a view of why you are building whatever you’re building right now, in the near future, and in the more distant future? MORE
Taking agile, a process otherwise optimized for small, cross-functional, collaborative teams and making it work at scale is fascinating. You have to change some elements, and retain others, as you redefine the context. MORE
You’ve got some shiny new segmentation data about prospective customers; how much they earn, where they are located, how old they are. How does that help you make decisions about your product? MORE
Product owners and product managers. Two roles, often done by one person. Together, the product people need to take an organization’s strategy, figure out the appropriate product strategy, and convert that into actionable work for the delivery teams to create the right product. MORE
Assumptions are interesting things – we all make them all the time, and we rarely acknowledge that we’re doing it. MORE
If you ask someone if they require encryption on their device, first of all, you will likely get one of two answers – yes or no – useful for segmenting your market or developing persona. MORE
Last month, Mike Smart of Egress Solutions and I gave a webinar for Pragmatic Marketing on product roadmapping when working in agile environments. We had a great turnout of over 1500 people in the session – with not nearly enough time to answer all of the questions. MORE
Forbes quoted Steve Jobs as saying “I’m as proud of what we don’t do as I am of what we do.” ” This is a really enlightened perspective – and a way to enforce focus from the top down. MORE
“Agile” is something most teams do wrong*, without realizing they’re doing it wrong. A good 2×2 matrix acts as a lens, helping to convert information into insight. MORE
What are your goals? A product organization has three overarching goals: Deliver great value to our customers. Do it quickly, efficiently, and with high quality. Do it better over time. A product organization that achieves those goals is much more likely to be successful. MORE
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. MORE
Tyner Blain
MAY 24, 2017
Taking agile, a process otherwise optimized for small, cross-functional, collaborative teams and making it work at scale is fascinating. You have to change some elements, and retain others, as you redefine the context.
Tyner Blain
JUNE 11, 2017
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.
Tyner Blain
SEPTEMBER 10, 2017
Understanding your users is critical to developing good products. A “complete” understanding is sometimes required, and always comes at a cost. A contextualized understanding is valuable but less so, and costly but less so.
Tyner Blain
JULY 10, 2017
You know you’re a product manager when this image causes more than a chuckle. A few random thoughts inspired by this Rorschach test of product management concepts from sunk cost fallacy to intentionality. Hanlon’s Razor.
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Every time an application team gets caught up in the “build vs buy” debate, it stalls projects and delays time to revenue. There is a third option. Partnering with an analytics development platform gives you the freedom to customize a solution without the risks and long-term costs of building your own. Learn when and why it makes sense to build, buy, or take a combined approach to embedded BI.
Tyner Blain
JANUARY 8, 2017
Assumptions are interesting things – we all make them all the time, and we rarely acknowledge that we’re doing it.
Tyner Blain
APRIL 7, 2015
Last month, Mike Smart of Egress Solutions and I gave a webinar for Pragmatic Marketing on product roadmapping when working in agile environments. We had a great turnout of over 1500 people in the session – with not nearly enough time to answer all of the questions.
Tyner Blain
DECEMBER 10, 2014
We hear a lot about building products which are “good enough” or “just barely good enough.” ” How do we know what “good enough” means for our customers? No one really tells us. Different Perspectives of Good Enough.
Tyner Blain
DECEMBER 3, 2014
Your product roadmap is a view of what you are building right now, in the near future, and in the more distant future. Or is your roadmap a view of why you are building whatever you’re building right now, in the near future, and in the more distant future?
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Choosing Whether to Build or Buy. To build and deliver products that customers love, product teams at leading enterprises such as Uber, Netflix and Airbnb are focusing on experimentation as a critical business process. These teams are empowered to A/B test each new feature and gain valuable insights before rolling it out widely. After seeing what these companies accomplish with experimentation, you may be considering whether to build your own testing framework, integrate an open source solution, or invest in a commercial experimentation platform like Optimizely Full Stack. Download this whitepaper to discover: The key questions product teams must ask before choosing to build or buy. The most common requirements that enterprise teams have for experimentation. How to avoid key mistakes and plan for success when building an internal system.
Tyner Blain
JUNE 3, 2016
How do you work with professional services, consulting, field engineers, etc. to make your product better? Do you just treat their inputs as yet another channel for feature requests , or do you engage them as an incredibly potent market-sensing capability? Conversation Starter.
Tyner Blain
APRIL 6, 2016
If you ask someone if they require encryption on their device, first of all, you will likely get one of two answers – yes or no – useful for segmenting your market or developing persona.
Tyner Blain
APRIL 29, 2015
Fundamentally, product management requires you to assess, synthesize, and prioritize the needs which drive the creation of your product in the context of three main objectives: desirability, viability, and feasibility. While laudable, these objectives are too abstract to be actionable.
Tyner Blain
MARCH 30, 2016
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.
Tyner Blain
FEBRUARY 17, 2016
Software as a Service is not a one and done transactional offering. A product or business built on SaaS is built on the subscription model – recurring revenue is half of what drives the business (and valuation). The other half is the rate of growth of that recurring revenue.
Advertisement
Why do some embedded analytics projects succeed while others fail? We surveyed 500+ application teams embedding analytics to find out which analytics features actually move the needle. Read the 6th annual State of Embedded Analytics Report to discover new best practices.
Tyner Blain
NOVEMBER 12, 2014
“Agile” is something most teams do wrong*, without realizing they’re doing it wrong. A good 2×2 matrix acts as a lens, helping to convert information into insight.
Tyner Blain
JULY 17, 2013
There is a lot of advice out there for how to write requirements. There is not as much discussion about why to write requirements. Spend some time thinking about why you write requirements before you make decisions about how to write your requirements. Why Write Requirements?
Tyner Blain
JULY 9, 2013
There are several ways to answer the question “is agile cheaper than waterfall?” ” Here are two of my favorites: “It depends. Agile done well is cheaper, as long as you measure correctly.” ” “You’re asking the wrong question.
Tyner Blain
JUNE 12, 2014
Agile is not magical. Changing from a waterfall process to an agile process changes how your team works, and helps eliminate inefficiencies. Adopting an agile process does not let you magically have a more successful product. What makes agile powerful is also makes it dangerous. Triage and Urgency.
Advertisement
How Product Development Teams Reduce Guesswork and Innovate Faster. Product development teams are embracing iterative release processes such as agile and continuous delivery to mitigate risk and adapt to evolving customer requirements. This trend is enabling teams to be more productive and increase product quality. But how do you know if you are building the right product or feature? Experimentation can help your team prove whether you are building the right product and eliminate uncertainty and guesswork from your software development process. Download this whitepaper to learn: How experimentation fits in with the agile development process. Best practices for integrating experimentation into your release process. Key considerations when buying an experimentation solution. Ways to optimize performance and ensure security and compliance.
Tyner Blain
AUGUST 1, 2014
Theodore Levitt may have developed the whole product model to help companies compete more effectively with their products. We wrote about the whole product game based on Mr. Levitt’s work.
Tyner Blain
JANUARY 5, 2015
Forbes quoted Steve Jobs as saying “I’m as proud of what we don’t do as I am of what we do.” ” This is a really enlightened perspective – and a way to enforce focus from the top down.
Tyner Blain
FEBRUARY 11, 2015
You’ve got some shiny new segmentation data about prospective customers; how much they earn, where they are located, how old they are. How does that help you make decisions about your product?
Tyner Blain
AUGUST 7, 2013
Paddy Barrett in Ireland is preparing his Master’s thesis on Product Management and would like to interview (USA) state-side product managers for his primary research. It would be awesome if you could help him, and help us all. My Connection.
Advertisement
Just by embedding analytics, application owners can charge 24% more for their product. How much value could you add? This framework explains how application enhancements can extend your product offerings.
Tyner Blain
AUGUST 1, 2013
How can Theodore Levitt’s classic Whole Product approach help with defining a product roadmap? I’ve been revisiting his concepts and their use recently, thinking about how to revise them for some exercises I’ve been doing with product teams. Whole Product Game Background.
280 Group
JULY 30, 2018
Perhaps the most sought-after aspect of Public Relations is known as “Earned Media”, i.e. the coverage you get in various media without paying for it. This can be a powerful tool in B2B, but to earn your coverage you’ve got to create something worth publishing.
280 Group
JULY 30, 2018
Throw Out The “Laundry List”. My boss calls me into his office and says that it’s time to create a new product description. “OK,” OK,” I say, not sure what to expect at this new company. He opens a spreadsheet and we start filling in the product requirements.
PM Hardcore
AUGUST 7, 2018
Understand and articulate what you’re trying to achieve. This article is a follow-on to my overview article on persuasion tips for product managers.). Every presentation or opportunity for persuasion has a goal, or possibly a few goals.
Advertisement
Insights from 300 Technology Product Management Executives and Managers.
Roman Pichler
AUGUST 14, 2018
What Maturity Means. A product is mature if it has stopped growing: The benefits it creates no longer rise. Instead, they have started to stagnate. In terms of the product life cycle model, the product has left the growth stage and entered maturity, as the following picture shows.
bpma ProductHub
NOVEMBER 27, 2017
How the past can provide context for your future plans. For our recent book, Product Roadmaps Relaunched: How to Set Direction while Embracing Uncertainty (O’Reilly), my co-authors C. Todd Lombardo, Evan Ryan, and I interviewed over 80 practicing product people.
PM Hardcore
JULY 30, 2018
After a few well-received presentations to senior executives, a few colleagues at my new company asked me, based on the positive effect I got, “Can you give us some tips on persuasion?”.
280 Group
OCTOBER 24, 2017
280 Group CEO and Founder, Brian Lawley, is once again joined by the prominent author, consultant and trainer, Greg Cohen. Greg works for 280 Group and has authored best-selling books such as Agile Excellence for Product Managers, Lean Product Management, and Strategy Excellence for Product Managers.
Advertisement
Drive Quality and Velocity with Feature Flags. Launching a new feature is a risky proposition. Even the most well designed and researched features can have unforeseen consequences for your application performance and business metrics. Rolling back a poor performing feature can be time consuming and costly. However, it doesn’t have to be. Implement feature management and experimentation in your development lifecycle to reduce risk and prove impact when launching features. Download this whitepaper to learn: How to ship products faster with higher quality. The best way to launch features with less risk and more control. How to prove the impact of every feature release with experimentation.
PM Hardcore
JULY 13, 2018
What are your goals? A product organization has three overarching goals: Deliver great value to our customers. Do it quickly, efficiently, and with high quality. Do it better over time. A product organization that achieves those goals is much more likely to be successful.
Roman Pichler
MARCH 12, 2018
Feature Broker and Product Dictator. How do you best lead the stakeholders and development team as the person in charge of the product? One way to answer this question is to avoid unhelpful but common leadership styles.
bpma ProductHub
MAY 31, 2018
By Ellen Gottesdiener Part 2: 5 Ways to Untangle the Mess In part 1 of this blog, I outlined the confusion between what a Product Manager does and what a Product Owner does. The difference and overlaps between product management and product ownership work illustrated how activities span both strategic and tactical product management. With… Product Strategy
Roman Pichler
MAY 8, 2018
Three Types of Leadership. Scrum is a simple framework with three roles: product owner, development team, and Scrum Master. Each role provides a distinct type of leadership. As the product owner, you lead the product and are responsible for its overall success.
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