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
1 Focus on Goals and Benefits. 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
As you may know, the product owner originated from Scrum, where the role is responsible for maximising the value the product creates. This sounds like a text-book product management responsibility to me. MORE
Here’s a scenario nearly everyone finds themselves in at some point in this line of work: You’re psyched about a new product or feature in the works. You’ve got requirements, design vision, and even a development timeline. You’ve got feedback from potential buyers and they love it. 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
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 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
I was invited to appear before an audience of tech recruiters for a panel called: “Everything you’ve ever wanted to know from a technologist, but were too shy to ask.” I realized I needed a good way to explain what it had taken me a while to see in the world of product management. MORE
Option 1: In the Sprint Review Meeting. Your first option is to work on the product backlog in the sprint review meeting. 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
Dave Wascha started as a product manager 20 years ago working on Internet Explorer 4.0. 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
It wasn’t too long ago that designers and developers were disciples of strictly separate crafts – but today, someone who can do both well is quickly labelled a “unicorn”, and sought after by many a unicorn-thirsty start-up. 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
One of the best signs of an effective product team is a regular cadence of customer interviews and product experiments. But it’s not enough to simply check the box on these activities; we need to make sure that we do them effectively. 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
“Big data.” It’s one of Silicon Valley’s favorite and most annoying buzzwords, yet there’s no data shortage in sight as data companies continue sprouting (and growing) like weeds. 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
Can’t get your boss to part ways with a time-based feature roadmap? Then sell them on the risk. I wonder what it is about feature roadmaps that is comforting to the C-suite. MORE
Pepsi’s product managers screwed up Diet Pepsi, can they fix it? Image Credit: Mike Mozart. I think that we do need to hand it to the Pepsi product managers – at least on paper they did everything that they really should have done. MORE
While you might “own” the product, your product’s vision should be coming from the top of the house. It should be driving everything in your organization, not just product development. Sales, operations, technology… all of it should be working toward a common vision. MORE
Like most of us, when Melissa Perri started as a product manager she started with giant requirements documents, dutifully recording every little detail from stakeholders and turning them into shiny docs for the developers. Then she discovered Agile and churned out features even faster. MORE
“What is the difference between a Product Owner and a Product Manager?” It’s an interesting question and one that takes time to unpack. Let’s look at where these terms and disciplines originated from and how some common frameworks explain them. MORE
Prioritisation is a necessary evil of every product development lifecycle. Deciding what to build, where to focus limited resources and what customer segments to target are questions that face every organisation on a daily basis. With this being the case, why do companies prioritise so badly? 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
No (picture credit at the bottom). Sometimes No Is The Right Answer. Can you talk to me about a time when you had to say no to a customer? Why did you have to say no? How did you handle it? MORE
Shaun Russell shares his journey into product management, sketching out the well-trodden path he took to getting started – reading, taking workshops, learning from peers, and so on. But being a product manager is really hard, and nothing can prepare you for it. 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
We live and work today in a world that is increasingly data-driven, but we cannot successfully adopt a data-driven approach to decision making without first identifying the metrics that matter most. 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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
Roman Pichler
JULY 20, 2016
1 Focus on Goals and Benefits.
UserVoice
JULY 28, 2017
We live and work today in a world that is increasingly data-driven, but we cannot successfully adopt a data-driven approach to decision making without first identifying the metrics that matter most.
UserVoice
JUNE 21, 2017
“Big data.” It’s one of Silicon Valley’s favorite and most annoying buzzwords, yet there’s no data shortage in sight as data companies continue sprouting (and growing) like weeds.
Mind the Product
AUGUST 11, 2017
Dave Wascha started as a product manager 20 years ago working on Internet Explorer 4.0.
Product Talk
MARCH 8, 2017
One of the best signs of an effective product team is a regular cadence of customer interviews and product experiments. But it’s not enough to simply check the box on these activities; we need to make sure that we do them effectively.
Melissa Perri
JUNE 29, 2017
“What is the difference between a Product Owner and a Product Manager?” It’s an interesting question and one that takes time to unpack. Let’s look at where these terms and disciplines originated from and how some common frameworks explain them.
Mind the Product
MAY 10, 2017
Here’s a scenario nearly everyone finds themselves in at some point in this line of work: You’re psyched about a new product or feature in the works. You’ve got requirements, design vision, and even a development timeline. You’ve got feedback from potential buyers and they love it.
Mind the Product
OCTOBER 27, 2016
It wasn’t too long ago that designers and developers were disciples of strictly separate crafts – but today, someone who can do both well is quickly labelled a “unicorn”, and sought after by many a unicorn-thirsty start-up.
Mind the Product
JULY 28, 2017
Like most of us, when Melissa Perri started as a product manager she started with giant requirements documents, dutifully recording every little detail from stakeholders and turning them into shiny docs for the developers. Then she discovered Agile and churned out features even faster.
PM Hardcore
SEPTEMBER 1, 2017
No (picture credit at the bottom). Sometimes No Is The Right Answer. Can you talk to me about a time when you had to say no to a customer? Why did you have to say no? How did you handle it?
Roman Pichler
JANUARY 25, 2017
Option 1: In the Sprint Review Meeting. Your first option is to work on the product backlog in the sprint review meeting.
Mind the Product
JULY 4, 2017
I was invited to appear before an audience of tech recruiters for a panel called: “Everything you’ve ever wanted to know from a technologist, but were too shy to ask.” I realized I needed a good way to explain what it had taken me a while to see in the world of product management.
Mind the Product
JULY 12, 2017
Prioritisation is a necessary evil of every product development lifecycle. Deciding what to build, where to focus limited resources and what customer segments to target are questions that face every organisation on a daily basis. With this being the case, why do companies prioritise so badly?
Mind the Product
FEBRUARY 14, 2017
Shaun Russell shares his journey into product management, sketching out the well-trodden path he took to getting started – reading, taking workshops, learning from peers, and so on. But being a product manager is really hard, and nothing can prepare you for it.
Roman Pichler
MARCH 14, 2017
As you may know, the product owner originated from Scrum, where the role is responsible for maximising the value the product creates. This sounds like a text-book product management responsibility to me.
Mind the Product
MAY 22, 2017
Can’t get your boss to part ways with a time-based feature roadmap? Then sell them on the risk. I wonder what it is about feature roadmaps that is comforting to the C-suite.
The Accidental Product Manager
AUGUST 21, 2017
Pepsi’s product managers screwed up Diet Pepsi, can they fix it? Image Credit: Mike Mozart. I think that we do need to hand it to the Pepsi product managers – at least on paper they did everything that they really should have done.
UserVoice
AUGUST 16, 2016
While you might “own” the product, your product’s vision should be coming from the top of the house. It should be driving everything in your organization, not just product development. Sales, operations, technology… all of it should be working toward a common vision.
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