When we say that Product Managers “lead through influence,” most people think of building rapport with the execution teams to ensure that you have the personal and professional leverage required to get them to do something without challenging things for their own reasons. But that’s really only a small piece of the overall leadership puzzle, and […]
Scrum is Just a Starting Point
Awhile back, I got into a rather heated discussion with someone who was a firm believer in “textbook Scrum” and insisted that because the Product Owner is part of the Scrum Team (according to the biblical Scrum Guide) that they simply must be involved in every retrospective with the team, no matter what. This discussion reminded me of […]
When the Chips Are Down, Our Values Show Through
There comes a time in every Product Manager’s life when they face adversity and challenges above and beyond the day-to-day administrivia that we struggle with every day. And it’s in these moments, at these times, that we find out what we really believe in, and what we’re really willing to do to stand our ground […]
How to Get Organizational Alignment with your Product Roadmap
This is the third in an ongoing series of blog posts originally published on the UserVoice Product Management blog. One of the constant tensions that product managers around the world deal with on a regular basis is creating product roadmaps that align with the expectations and needs of all of their stakeholders – particularly the management or […]
Examining the Twelve Principles of Agile
A lot of attention is paid (here, as well as elsewhere) on the “Agile Manifesto“, and while it’s an important component of the Agile way of thinking, it’s not the be-all, end-all statement that came out of the Snowbird conference around the turn of the century. Rather, there are twelve guiding principles in addition to the four […]