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Product management is an interesting career. We don’t code; we’re not necessarily engineers. And yet, we must communicate with and understand our development team. Our products are built under the guiding hand of technology experts. Imagine their work as a cloud—they take input from our companies, do something, and we get new product to sell. Product managers hover really close to that development cloud, and sometimes we feel like we’re actually in it! MORE
“The product shall.”. Market requirements typically define the problems your product will address using a formal, stilted language known to all technology people. For some reason, the verb shall be “shall”—not “should” or “will” or “must” or “it’d be neat if.” Maybe it goes all the way back to the Ten Commandments: You Shall Honor Thy Father and Mother; You Shall Not Murder; You Shall Not Steal. You Shall Not Write Requirements Without the Verb Shall. MORE
Product Managers are responsible for the overall market success of their products, not just delivery of software. In the Agile world, a new title is emerging -- the Product Owner -- which covers just a small subset of the Product Management role. MORE
Agile product managers (and their Agile development teams) are told to prioritize backlogs based on ROI. In practice, this isn't possible. Prioritizing for Profit is a better approach. By defining a core set of attributes that include stakeholder preferences, corporate strategy, and specific ways to increase profitability, product managers can create backlogs that support the company's longer-term goals as well as short-term development needs. Watch "Prioritizing Your Backlog for Profit". MORE
Agile development gives the software product manager a good sense of orientation. Therefore it’s no surprise that when the development team steps away from using scrum or their preferred agile techniques things get a little disorientated. I've observed this on two occasions over the past few years. Totally moving away from scrum/agile The first time was in the summer of 2007 when we where planning a major redesign of a B2B website. MORE
Sometimes it seems that agile development is an end run around effective product planning and market analysis. It also can undermine product positioning and roadmapping. Yet the benefits of a more responsive and productive product development team are too significant to ignore. MORE
There are many good product management frameworks available - however, I thought I would create an agile product management framework that is broad enough to be applicable to any product management groups that is practising agile/scrum. Each activity has an associated document that is vital for communicating to the various stakeholders. MORE
Watch Five Common Challenges for Product Managers in Agile Teams. Download the Webinar. Download the Webinar. Download from iTunes. Download the Slides. Get Notified of Webinars MORE
I received a phone call at the beginning of the year from PM magazine. They wanted to interview me on my thoughts on how young members of a product team could grow in their careers. The questions they asked along with my answers are as follows: 1. What can young project team members do to climb the learning curve, make an impact and stand out in the eyes of their managers? Make sure that you deliver your tasks on time. MORE
I'm often asked about my Y Combinator experience so I thought I would take the time to blog about it. I did Y Combinator the Summer of 2007 in Boston with two awesome co-founders. We built Anywhere.FM , a web music player that brought an iTunes-like experience to the web, and eventually sold it to imeem. So what is Y Combinator? Y Combinator is a new kind of seed stage venture firm. While they provide financing and advice like all venture investors, their model for doing so is very different. MORE
How would you like to ship something every week? Agile software development methods can produce dramatic productivity improvements but can also create havoc for Sales and Marketing teams. Frequent product releases can often surpass the ability of organizations to absorb the changes in a manageable way. This can result in new product capabilities that should be emphasized being lost in the chaos of getting the product to market. It also has the potential to disrupt the sales cycle. MORE
Your developers have gone agile. They want a backlog and user stories. Executives want a roadmap with a longer view. How do you connect strategy with execution? What happens to the roadmap and requirements when you go agile? Attend this session to find out what product managers need to provide to their agile development teams. Watch Agile, Roadmaps, and Requirements: Are they mutually exclusive? Download the Webinar. Download the Webinar. Download from iTunes. Download the Slides. MORE
I expect in 2009 we will see continued growth throughout the virtual currency ecosystem. So are you thinking about adding a virtual economy to your app or website? The great news is there are a variety of startups out there waiting to help you! Incentivized CPA Offers and Direct Payments. Over the last two years more than a half dozen partners have emerged to supply publishers with offers and direct payment options to fuel cash flows into their virtual economy. MORE
I have been always pinged and disturbed by this single question “Why is there suffering in the world?” In our country and probably every developing country it is not difficult to find small children in rags begging on the roadside; women in torn out clothes carrying their infant and begging for the sake of the infant; physically men, women and sadly even children begging. In Mumbai, it goes to another level. Slums and Mumbai go hand in hand. MORE
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While software development teams have been moving toward agile methods for years, many product managers are only now becoming aware of it. An agile approach applies collaborative and continuous improvement concepts to software development. MORE
I can't count how many times in my career I've had to write a market requirements document (MRD) for a product that had already gone to market. It's sad, actually. Because when I've found myself asking fundamental questions like. Who are we selling this product to? How are we going to sell this product? What is the competitive landscape we're selling into? What are the sizes of our buyer segments? MORE
In this audio interview I speak with the author of the blog Purist Product Management : Aziz Musa. I had the opportunity to work with Aziz for a year at Reed Business Information and found him to be an inspirational and focussed product manager. MORE
Everyone knows that acquisitions in 2009 with be far fewer than those in the previous years. As we won't see much growth in online advertising in 2009 , charging your users directly for your service will become a much more popular model. Y Combinator is famous for its well known motto " Make Something People Want." MORE
The assembly election result of Maharashtra is out and bang!!!! MNS ( Maharashtra Navnirman Sena) wins 13 seats. MNS has managed to hit the headlines of newspapers and TV channels and grab the attention of all sorts of media be it films, newspapers, television that it needs no introduction. The win shows that its acts did have an impact and has been able to influence people to believe in its ideology and way of working. MORE
What is the role of product management in an agile environment? Is the role of product owner something different? Developers often see product managers as technical resources. Agile seems to have made this orientation worse, with product managers getting pulled into deeper, tactical activities. But spending so much time with internal teams means less time spent in the market as a resource for strategy and business thinking at the product level. MORE
However, I suspect with the flight towards revenue for many technology companies in 2009, entrepreneurs leveraging the media content should expect significant advertising in all syndicated media. Last year at the SocialMedia Business School I gave a presentation on Media APIs and how they could be leveraged to enhance existing experiences or build entirely new services around freely available media content. MORE
Background. Barbara Nelson said in The Politics of Agile , “When product managers weren’t looking, the developers went agile.” ” Indeed, many Product Managers were taken by surprise at the speed of Agile’s adoption. And with the introduction of a new Product Owner role and its perceived overlap with the traditional Product Manager function, Product Managers have expressed some anxiety about the future of their role. MORE
The most exciting news out of CES 2009 was the Palm announcement of the Palm Pre, webOS, and Palm Mojo Application Framework. Palm to my surprise has reinvented itself and gotten back into the smartphone game with the release of the sexy Palm Pre device and new webOS operating system. Early indications suggests it should be in the same consideration set as Apple iPhone, Android G1, and Blackberry Storm. MORE
Eighteen months ago, I was part of the founding team at a cutting-edge technology start-up. During the first few weeks, as I lined up and conducted dozens of prospect, industry, and expert interviews, the founder hired a talented senior engineering team, and the company was formed. Agile. Mostly by design, but partly because it just worked. While I didn’t have the challenge of undoing existing processes, since none yet existed, I did still have a learning curve. MORE
So here is my list of the top underhyped platforms that I hope to see many entrepreneurs build on in 2009. Mail, with over 250M users , has announced its application platform , launched a few white listed applications (Xoopit, Wordpress), and plans on opening up more broadly in 2009. I expect in 2009 we will see the complete opening up of these platforms and maybe even Windows Live Hotmail, with its 250M users as well. MORE
It's that time of year that everyone is putting together their predictions for 2009 and so I decided to do one of my own. There clearly continues to be an opportunity in 2009 to more efficiently bring fans to see their favorite artists at live events. Over the past year I've had the opportunity to work with a variety of music startups. Not only with the two music startups I've been directly involved with ( Anywhere.FM MORE
There are ten easily identifiable signs that can help forecast a product launch may be in trouble. Signs you can address and fix before the launch becomes a disaster. The process of introducing a product to market is a serious undertaking. Unfortunately for many companies it’s merely an afterthought; a checklist of deliverables created at the end of product development. MORE
Picked up this book called " Outliers " from office library. The book deals with analysis of lives of some of the most known personalities like Bill Gates, The Beatles etc. One of the concept coined as "The 10,000 hour rule" is very inspiring. In simple words, the result of analysis stated in the book says that it takes approximately 10,000 + hours to excel in the task taken up to master it and excel in it. It made my belief in my concept of "Interia of Life" even more stronger. MORE
The Indian history and Indian mythology has mention of events and powers which do not exist currently and which do not have any scientific reasoning. To list a few, raag “ Malhar ” by Tansen is believed to have caused rains when sung. Similarly, raag “Deepak” would light up all the lamps. Ravana was supposedly having a plane which he used to kidnap Sita(Wife of Rama). It was called “Pushpaka Vimana”. Our history has rich mention of many more such fanastic events, people with extraordinary powers. MORE
In May 2008, I authored an article that discussed the day-to-day challenges facing the Product Manager in the Agile world. In that article, I remarked that the debate surrounding the role of the Scrum Master and Product Owner was worthy of a paper all of their own. A colleague of mine called my bluff the other day by asking me “ What’s the issue with Scrum Masters and Product Owners? MORE
It has been exactly a year since I started this blog, as it was one of my new year's resolutions for 2009. While it's far from where I'd like to be with blogging, 2009 was a solid start. Here's a look back at the highlights: Top Five Posts from 2009 (by pageviews). 5 Music Startups to Watch in 2009. So how did I do? MORE
Despite my post last week on the Shortcomings of Google App Engine and my decision to move away from it as a viable platform for upcoming projects, I have been impressed with the overall architecture and design of their experimental Task Queue API. Google throughout its years has been a leader in interface design and that has been reflected not only in the UI of the products they have built, but the countless API interfaces they have published. MORE
As many of you know, I have been a huge fan of Google App Engine. I love the vision and truly believe its the first real platform-as-a-service as opposed to the other dominant cloud platform Amazon AWS. While AWS has significantly moved the industry forward with on-demand virtualized instances and cloud storage, it has not developed a fully scalable runtime environment comparable to Google App Engine. MORE
Several months ago I had the opportunity to sit in on a guest lecture Clara Shih gave at the Stanford Seminar on People, Computers, and Design. Clara has spent the last several years at Salesforce leading their social networking product strategy as well as developed Faceconnector , the first business app on Facebook that made it easy to integrate Facebook profile data into Salesforce CRM tools. MORE
The murder occurred Nov 4, 2005 and only today on May 13, 2009 was the defendant tried and convicted of murder. In a departure from my usual focus on startups, I thought I would take a moment to reflect on my most recent experience in jury duty. I was selected as one of twelve jurors for a murder trial against a defendant who was accused of beating up his girlfriend and throwing her out of her apartment window in San Francisco in 2005. MORE
I wrote a blog post about an agile product management frame work that I had put together in order to give guidelines to the product team and help improve the quality and accuracy of the information on the product roadmap, backlog and release plans. The blog post dealt mainly with the creation of the roadmap. The presentation below gives a high level view of the other elements of the framework. Framework For Agile Product Management View more documents from morrisond. Agile Tips + Tools MORE
2009 Related Topics Sachin Rekhi
DECEMBER 31, 2009
It has been exactly a year since I started this blog, as it was one of my new year's resolutions for 2009. While it's far from where I'd like to be with blogging, 2009 was a solid start. Here's a look back at the highlights: Top Five Posts from 2009 (by pageviews). 5 Music Startups to Watch in 2009. So how did I do?
Sachin Rekhi
JANUARY 5, 2009
It's that time of year that everyone is putting together their predictions for 2009 and so I decided to do one of my own. There clearly continues to be an opportunity in 2009 to more efficiently bring fans to see their favorite artists at live events. Over the past year I've had the opportunity to work with a variety of music startups. Not only with the two music startups I've been directly involved with ( Anywhere.FM
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Pragmatic Marketing
NOVEMBER 9, 2009
While software development teams have been moving toward agile methods for years, many product managers are only now becoming aware of it. An agile approach applies collaborative and continuous improvement concepts to software development.
Pragmatic Marketing
NOVEMBER 8, 2009
I can't count how many times in my career I've had to write a market requirements document (MRD) for a product that had already gone to market. It's sad, actually. Because when I've found myself asking fundamental questions like. Who are we selling this product to? How are we going to sell this product? What is the competitive landscape we're selling into? What are the sizes of our buyer segments?
Pragmatic Marketing
NOVEMBER 5, 2009
What is the role of product management in an agile environment? Is the role of product owner something different? Developers often see product managers as technical resources. Agile seems to have made this orientation worse, with product managers getting pulled into deeper, tactical activities. But spending so much time with internal teams means less time spent in the market as a resource for strategy and business thinking at the product level.
Pragmatic Marketing
SEPTEMBER 16, 2009
Eighteen months ago, I was part of the founding team at a cutting-edge technology start-up. During the first few weeks, as I lined up and conducted dozens of prospect, industry, and expert interviews, the founder hired a talented senior engineering team, and the company was formed. Agile. Mostly by design, but partly because it just worked. While I didn’t have the challenge of undoing existing processes, since none yet existed, I did still have a learning curve.
Pragmatic Marketing
SEPTEMBER 13, 2009
There are ten easily identifiable signs that can help forecast a product launch may be in trouble. Signs you can address and fix before the launch becomes a disaster. The process of introducing a product to market is a serious undertaking. Unfortunately for many companies it’s merely an afterthought; a checklist of deliverables created at the end of product development.
Pragmatic Marketing
JULY 31, 2009
“The product shall.”. Market requirements typically define the problems your product will address using a formal, stilted language known to all technology people. For some reason, the verb shall be “shall”—not “should” or “will” or “must” or “it’d be neat if.” Maybe it goes all the way back to the Ten Commandments: You Shall Honor Thy Father and Mother; You Shall Not Murder; You Shall Not Steal. You Shall Not Write Requirements Without the Verb Shall.
Pragmatic Marketing
JULY 31, 2009
Product management is an interesting career. We don’t code; we’re not necessarily engineers. And yet, we must communicate with and understand our development team. Our products are built under the guiding hand of technology experts. Imagine their work as a cloud—they take input from our companies, do something, and we get new product to sell. Product managers hover really close to that development cloud, and sometimes we feel like we’re actually in it!
Pragmatic Marketing
JULY 13, 2009
Agile product managers (and their Agile development teams) are told to prioritize backlogs based on ROI. In practice, this isn't possible. Prioritizing for Profit is a better approach. By defining a core set of attributes that include stakeholder preferences, corporate strategy, and specific ways to increase profitability, product managers can create backlogs that support the company's longer-term goals as well as short-term development needs. Watch "Prioritizing Your Backlog for Profit".
Pragmatic Marketing
JULY 13, 2009
Product Managers are responsible for the overall market success of their products, not just delivery of software. In the Agile world, a new title is emerging -- the Product Owner -- which covers just a small subset of the Product Management role.
|
Pragmatic Marketing
JULY 12, 2009
Sometimes it seems that agile development is an end run around effective product planning and market analysis. It also can undermine product positioning and roadmapping. Yet the benefits of a more responsive and productive product development team are too significant to ignore.
Pragmatic Marketing
JULY 8, 2009
Watch Five Common Challenges for Product Managers in Agile Teams. Download the Webinar. Download the Webinar. Download from iTunes. Download the Slides. Get Notified of Webinars
Pragmatic Marketing
JULY 1, 2009
How would you like to ship something every week? Agile software development methods can produce dramatic productivity improvements but can also create havoc for Sales and Marketing teams. Frequent product releases can often surpass the ability of organizations to absorb the changes in a manageable way. This can result in new product capabilities that should be emphasized being lost in the chaos of getting the product to market. It also has the potential to disrupt the sales cycle.
Pragmatic Marketing
JUNE 30, 2009
Your developers have gone agile. They want a backlog and user stories. Executives want a roadmap with a longer view. How do you connect strategy with execution? What happens to the roadmap and requirements when you go agile? Attend this session to find out what product managers need to provide to their agile development teams. Watch Agile, Roadmaps, and Requirements: Are they mutually exclusive? Download the Webinar. Download the Webinar. Download from iTunes. Download the Slides.
Pragmatic Marketing
JANUARY 29, 2009
In May 2008, I authored an article that discussed the day-to-day challenges facing the Product Manager in the Agile world. In that article, I remarked that the debate surrounding the role of the Scrum Master and Product Owner was worthy of a paper all of their own. A colleague of mine called my bluff the other day by asking me “ What’s the issue with Scrum Masters and Product Owners?
All About Product Management
JUNE 30, 2009
I received a phone call at the beginning of the year from PM magazine. They wanted to interview me on my thoughts on how young members of a product team could grow in their careers. The questions they asked along with my answers are as follows: 1. What can young project team members do to climb the learning curve, make an impact and stand out in the eyes of their managers? Make sure that you deliver your tasks on time.
All About Product Management
MARCH 1, 2009
There are many good product management frameworks available - however, I thought I would create an agile product management framework that is broad enough to be applicable to any product management groups that is practising agile/scrum. Each activity has an associated document that is vital for communicating to the various stakeholders.
All About Product Management
AUGUST 27, 2009
In this audio interview I speak with the author of the blog Purist Product Management : Aziz Musa. I had the opportunity to work with Aziz for a year at Reed Business Information and found him to be an inspirational and focussed product manager.
All About Product Management
JULY 1, 2009
I wrote a blog post about an agile product management frame work that I had put together in order to give guidelines to the product team and help improve the quality and accuracy of the information on the product roadmap, backlog and release plans. The blog post dealt mainly with the creation of the roadmap. The presentation below gives a high level view of the other elements of the framework. Framework For Agile Product Management View more documents from morrisond. Agile Tips + Tools
All About Product Management
FEBRUARY 1, 2009
Agile development gives the software product manager a good sense of orientation. Therefore it’s no surprise that when the development team steps away from using scrum or their preferred agile techniques things get a little disorientated. I've observed this on two occasions over the past few years. Totally moving away from scrum/agile The first time was in the summer of 2007 when we where planning a major redesign of a B2B website.
Sachin Rekhi
JANUARY 7, 2009
So here is my list of the top underhyped platforms that I hope to see many entrepreneurs build on in 2009. Mail, with over 250M users , has announced its application platform , launched a few white listed applications (Xoopit, Wordpress), and plans on opening up more broadly in 2009. I expect in 2009 we will see the complete opening up of these platforms and maybe even Windows Live Hotmail, with its 250M users as well.
Sachin Rekhi
MAY 13, 2009
The murder occurred Nov 4, 2005 and only today on May 13, 2009 was the defendant tried and convicted of murder. In a departure from my usual focus on startups, I thought I would take a moment to reflect on my most recent experience in jury duty. I was selected as one of twelve jurors for a murder trial against a defendant who was accused of beating up his girlfriend and throwing her out of her apartment window in San Francisco in 2005.
Sachin Rekhi
AUGUST 24, 2009
Despite my post last week on the Shortcomings of Google App Engine and my decision to move away from it as a viable platform for upcoming projects, I have been impressed with the overall architecture and design of their experimental Task Queue API. Google throughout its years has been a leader in interface design and that has been reflected not only in the UI of the products they have built, but the countless API interfaces they have published.
Sachin Rekhi
AUGUST 17, 2009
As many of you know, I have been a huge fan of Google App Engine. I love the vision and truly believe its the first real platform-as-a-service as opposed to the other dominant cloud platform Amazon AWS. While AWS has significantly moved the industry forward with on-demand virtualized instances and cloud storage, it has not developed a fully scalable runtime environment comparable to Google App Engine.
SidsAvenue
DECEMBER 19, 2009
I have been always pinged and disturbed by this single question “Why is there suffering in the world?” In our country and probably every developing country it is not difficult to find small children in rags begging on the roadside; women in torn out clothes carrying their infant and begging for the sake of the infant; physically men, women and sadly even children begging. In Mumbai, it goes to another level. Slums and Mumbai go hand in hand.
Sachin Rekhi
JANUARY 25, 2009
Everyone knows that acquisitions in 2009 with be far fewer than those in the previous years. As we won't see much growth in online advertising in 2009 , charging your users directly for your service will become a much more popular model. Y Combinator is famous for its well known motto " Make Something People Want."
Sachin Rekhi
JANUARY 11, 2009
The most exciting news out of CES 2009 was the Palm announcement of the Palm Pre, webOS, and Palm Mojo Application Framework. Palm to my surprise has reinvented itself and gotten back into the smartphone game with the release of the sexy Palm Pre device and new webOS operating system. Early indications suggests it should be in the same consideration set as Apple iPhone, Android G1, and Blackberry Storm.
SidsAvenue
NOVEMBER 7, 2009
The assembly election result of Maharashtra is out and bang!!!! MNS ( Maharashtra Navnirman Sena) wins 13 seats. MNS has managed to hit the headlines of newspapers and TV channels and grab the attention of all sorts of media be it films, newspapers, television that it needs no introduction. The win shows that its acts did have an impact and has been able to influence people to believe in its ideology and way of working.
SidsAvenue
NOVEMBER 7, 2009
The Indian history and Indian mythology has mention of events and powers which do not exist currently and which do not have any scientific reasoning. To list a few, raag “ Malhar ” by Tansen is believed to have caused rains when sung. Similarly, raag “Deepak” would light up all the lamps. Ravana was supposedly having a plane which he used to kidnap Sita(Wife of Rama). It was called “Pushpaka Vimana”. Our history has rich mention of many more such fanastic events, people with extraordinary powers.
Sachin Rekhi
JUNE 22, 2009
Several months ago I had the opportunity to sit in on a guest lecture Clara Shih gave at the Stanford Seminar on People, Computers, and Design. Clara has spent the last several years at Salesforce leading their social networking product strategy as well as developed Faceconnector , the first business app on Facebook that made it easy to integrate Facebook profile data into Salesforce CRM tools.
Sachin Rekhi
JANUARY 16, 2009
However, I suspect with the flight towards revenue for many technology companies in 2009, entrepreneurs leveraging the media content should expect significant advertising in all syndicated media. Last year at the SocialMedia Business School I gave a presentation on Media APIs and how they could be leveraged to enhance existing experiences or build entirely new services around freely available media content.
Sachin Rekhi
FEBRUARY 15, 2009
I expect in 2009 we will see continued growth throughout the virtual currency ecosystem. So are you thinking about adding a virtual economy to your app or website? The great news is there are a variety of startups out there waiting to help you! Incentivized CPA Offers and Direct Payments. Over the last two years more than a half dozen partners have emerged to supply publishers with offers and direct payment options to fuel cash flows into their virtual economy.
SidsAvenue
SEPTEMBER 15, 2009
Picked up this book called " Outliers " from office library. The book deals with analysis of lives of some of the most known personalities like Bill Gates, The Beatles etc. One of the concept coined as "The 10,000 hour rule" is very inspiring. In simple words, the result of analysis stated in the book says that it takes approximately 10,000 + hours to excel in the task taken up to master it and excel in it. It made my belief in my concept of "Interia of Life" even more stronger.
Sachin Rekhi
FEBRUARY 26, 2009
I'm often asked about my Y Combinator experience so I thought I would take the time to blog about it. I did Y Combinator the Summer of 2007 in Boston with two awesome co-founders. We built Anywhere.FM , a web music player that brought an iTunes-like experience to the web, and eventually sold it to imeem. So what is Y Combinator? Y Combinator is a new kind of seed stage venture firm. While they provide financing and advice like all venture investors, their model for doing so is very different.
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