In the world today, it’s no longer efficient or effective for a Product Manager in any company to devote months of time, effort, and expense in designing and developing new products or new product features. The market moves faster than that, and even in traditionally slower markets like B2B customers are increasingly exposed to the […]
Solving for the Commitment-Phobic Developer
Since the Clever PM is recovering from a nasty bug, he’s going to rely on Quora for a little Clever content again, this time focusing on the question “How do you get developers to commit to finishing a sprint on time?” I chose this one because it plays into one of the common misconceptions about Scrum […]
Never Let the Perfect be the Enemy of the Good
There’s a strong tendency in product management and user experience circles to want to ensure that the product you ship is “perfect” and that it touches every corner case and every single use case that your customers may need elegantly, efficiently, and with no learning curve. This is an entirely unrealistic expectation. The fact is, […]
The Importance of Continuous Improvement
Most of the “Agile” and “Lean” product design and development practices that we follow in the modern age can be directly linked to the lean manufacturing movement from the 1940s and 1950s, largely attributed to the work of W. Edward Deming and his influence on the post-war Japanese manufacturing culture. Deming relied on a “Plan-Do-Study-Act” methodology […]
Anatomy of a User Story
Ironically, one of the most fundamental tools that Product Managers use every day to communicate requirements, expectations, and user goals to their development teams also sometimes seems to be one of the most difficult things to get right. Maybe it’s because many of us are used to the bad, old days of waterfall requirements, maybe […]
Getting Shit Done is Job #1
As a Product Manager, sometimes we get so caught up in either the macro or micro concerns of our day-to-day lives that we forget that getting shit done is our primary job. It does no good whatsoever to have our product remain in a constant state of development, with projects that get put on the shelf […]
Common Dysfunctions of “Scrum” Teams — Part 2
In the first part of this series, I talked about how many teams who try to transform into “Agile” teams fail because they don’t actually understand what being “agile” is all about, or because they try to cut corners by not fully embracing (at the outset, at least) the fundamental requirements of the methodology that they have […]
Common Dysfunctions of “Scrum” Teams — Part 1
I started this out as a single post, but it’s become far too unwieldy for a single day. Thus, I’m breaking this up into two segments — one focusing on missing the point, the other on finer mistakes that sink potentially “good” teams moving into Agile processes. It’s still one of my longest posts here, […]
Death By Gantt Chart
We’ve all been there — we’re talking about our upcoming projects, discussing possible timelines and resource allocations, working to align our tactical work with the company and product strategy, when it hits you like a brick thrown through your living room window in the middle of the latest Game of Thrones episode: So, where’s the […]
Overcoming Objections to Iterative Development
One of the common challenges that Product Managers have in advocating for more agile product definition and development practices is a rather ironic one — those in power and authority often feel that iteration “doesn’t work” because they feel that once something is “done” it won’t ever be revisited. The irony here is that it’s […]
The Three Forms of Waste – Muda, Mura, and Muri
With Agile development and Lean practices so popular nowadays, sometimes the history behind these practices and philosophies is overlooked or skipped over entirely. Unfortunately, when people miss the underpinnings upon which these concepts are based, they also tend to distort and remake those principles into something that only barely resembles the original concepts behind them. […]
Show & Tell Isn’t Just for Kindergarten
Over the course of my career, I’ve had the chance to work with a wide variety of tools and methods to document how something should work, what user goals are, what the workflow should be, and generally how a user gets from point A to point B and beyond. Throughout all that time, I’ve noticed […]