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Orienting to Value
Tyner Blain
JANUARY 23, 2021
Orienting to value – every team, every person does it differently. How you orient to value limits how much value you can create.
Tyner Blain
Epic Problem Statement
Tyner Blain
JULY 3, 2020
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.
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Agile at Scale – Outcome Driven (or Broken)
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. Being outcome driven, is one element you must retain – or even elevate in importance, or you fundamentally break the system of delivery. Getting Faster at Building the Wrong Thing.
Cause & Effect and Product Risk
Tyner Blain
FEBRUARY 4, 2019
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 call “building the wrong thing.” ” Cause and Effect is Foundational. There are two significant problems I see product teams facing which are deeply connected to each other.
Embedded Analytics Product Fit Guide - A Product Manager’s Handbook
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Adding embedded analytics to your software doesn’t have to be an overwhelming task. This guide is the perfect companion for SaaS product managers. It will walk you through the process of choosing the right analytics provider step by step.
The Potential of Agile
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. When an executive, too far removed from what makes creating products hard thinks of “agile” as a silver bullet it becomes difficult to manage expectations. Potential.
Market Problem Framing Example
Tyner Blain
NOVEMBER 26, 2018
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 strategy. Understanding how problems are framed in your market is critical to developing a successful product strategy. Ted Levitt Whole Product Model.
Progressively Elaborated Users
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. Even a shallow understanding of your users provides value by preventing some dysfunctional behaviors. You do not always need to develop personas before developing products. Before The UCD Mob Burns Down My Blog. Image by Robert Couse-Baker.
Product Management Synapses
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. “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” ” ( wikipedia ).
Outside-In User Story Example
Tyner Blain
OCTOBER 6, 2016
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. For those of us who are already thinking this way, the phrases become touchstones or short-hand. For folks who are not there yet, these may sound like platitudes or empty words.
Product Management: Guide to Thriving as a Product Manager
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As more organizations move from project to product thinking, Product Managers are occupying increasingly crucial roles. Download this guide to learn tips and strategies that will help you grow into a strong Product Manager and thrive in the position.
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Minimum Valuable Problem
Tyner Blain
JULY 22, 2016
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. It is a combination of solving the minimum valuable problem and all of the other things that go with it. Solving for both the outside-in needs and the inside-out goals is critical. Starting with Icebergs.
Features do not a Product Roadmap Make
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. One attendee asked, “ Please explain how a prioritized list of features is not a roadmap? ” A fantastic question, which we did not see in time to answer during the call. Why and What and When.
Product Owner Manager – Alone Together
Tyner Blain
APRIL 12, 2016
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. What does the product manager own, and for what is the product owner responsible? Product Management Overlaps.
Good Enough
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.
Report by Dresner Advisory Services: Embedded Business Intelligence Market Study
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According to the 2020 Dresner Embedded Business Intelligence Market Study, embedded business intelligence is crucial for application success. This report explores the current state of BI and why application teams are increasingly choosing an embedded solution.
Playing Whack-A-Mole With Risk
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. When it comes to developing a product strategy – or even making decisions about how best to create a product, one of these assumptions is likely to be what causes us to fail. We can, however, reduce the chance of that happening. Being Wrong. What does it feel like to be wrong? Watch about 25 seconds of this TED talk from Kathryn Schultz, starting at 4:09.
Opposite Views of a Product Roadmap
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? Your roadmap is both – but one is more important than the other – and product managers need to be able to view the roadmap both ways.
You Won’t Believe What These Five Lenses Can Show You About Your Product
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. That’s where the five lenses come in (I could not resist the Buzzfeed-styled title). The Product Strategy Grid.
Professional Services and Improving Your Product
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. I received an excellent and insightful question from one of my former students in DIT’s product management degree program (enrollment for the next cohort closes in a month).
Re-Thinking Translation for Business Growth in a Digital-First World
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Encryption is not Binary
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. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a better answer – “ you’re asking the wrong question! ” Be Outside-In, Not Inside-Out. Inside-out thinking is taking your current view of your product (or product-to-be), and mapping it to the problems you discover in the market.
Why Write Requirements
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?
Is Agile Really Cheaper?
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. The right question is: is agile better?” ” How Agile Is NOT Cheaper. The fun thing about relative terms is that you have to do a comparison.
Agile Through a Matrix Lens
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. Let’s apply this lens to agile as applied within a company, and see if it helps people decide to do things differently. When You Say Agile, What Do You Mean? There may be as many definitions of agile as there are teams practicing agile development.
Rightpoint Launches Cadillac's Reimagined In-Vehicle Experience
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Agile Cadabra
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. One tenet of agile is to make decisions at the last responsible moment. Following this powerful and easy-to-remember mantra reduces the risk that you are wasting time on unnecessary work.
Customer Churn and SaaS
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. Customer Churn is the loss of existing customers and the slope that makes growing a subscription business an uphill climb. Finding the Right Customers by Understanding Your Customers.
Product Owner Survival Camp
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. There’s always a gap between strategy and execution – and product owners are ideally positioned to help fill that gap.
Classifying Market Problems
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. Recently, I’ve been using a variant of this model as a way to view a product and upcoming roadmap items. It is a powerful way to share a perspective on your product with the rest of the team, and frame conversations about where best to invest. Whole Product Model.
Making Software Pirates Pay: An E-Commerce Playbook
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Why Not What – An Example
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. Before you can drive a “this goal is more important than that goal” focus, you have to make sure you’re actually focusing on the goals. The Customer Does NOT Know Best. The top review of a mobile phone app caught my attention over the weekend.
How is SaaS Changing Product Management – A Research Thesis
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. I am a visiting lecturer as part of the Dublin Institute of Technology’s Product Management degree program. Paddy was one of my students, and is now pursuing an interesting research topic for his master’s thesis.
You Don’t Know Jack (or Jill)
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? You know this information, but you don’t really know your audience, or why they might become your customers. Customer Needs Are A Function of Intent. Last month we looked at a single example of a customer expressing their wants instead of their needs – as most customers do.
Whole Product Game
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. In 1980, Mr. Levitt published his article through the Harvard Business Review – also available for sale as an eDoc through Amazon.
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