I’ve been working on B2B solutions for a very long time (dating almost all the way back to the turn of the millennia), and in that time I’ve come to realize that far too many applications try to be everything to everyone, and as a result really wind up serving nobody at all. You can […]
Agile Transitions – Managing Expectations
We live in a day and age where there’s a ton of information and mis-information out there about pretty much every topic imaginable, and Agile development is certainly not immune to this phenomenon. In fact, anyone who looks for help in pushing through an Agile transformation in their organization is immediately confronted with a vast […]
The Many Hats of the Product Manager
Sometimes an idea just strikes me out of the blue and sounds interesting enough to sit down and write a little bit about. This is one of those posts, spurred on by a discussion I had today with a newly-hired Product Manager with almost as much experience as me. As we were talking about our […]
Why Does Agility Matter?
We tend to take the fact that agility is important as a given, when the reality is that not everyone in the business world has reached the same conclusion. Thus, it’s important sometimes to take a step back and examine why agility actually matters, so that when we’re faced with people who aren’t as convinced as […]
Why “Scrumbut” Shouldn’t Be a Bad Word
There’s a term that gets floated around the Agile world by what I like to call the “textbook Scrummers” that really bugs the crap out of me, so much that I decided to write an article about the concept, and why I think it’s a wrong-headed, anti-agile concept. The concept is known as “ScrumBut” (a […]
A Product Manager’s Guide to Technical Debt
There’s always a fine balance to be found between making sure that your product is as buttoned-up as possible when it ships and the small (sometimes large) sacrifices that we have to ask our technical teams to make in order to just get the damn thing out the door. Within this gap lies the dreaded […]
Agile Transitions – How to Start With Practice, Not Theory
I’ve talked before about the dangers of a “cargo cult” mentality when it comes to Agile practices, but in this instance I’m going to take a Devil’s Advocate position, at least it will appear that way. All too often, people and companies start their Agile transitions with training about the “theory” of Agile — what […]
10 Questions: Rich Mironov
For the second installment of my “10 Questions With…” I reached out to one of my mentors in the PM/Consulting space, Rich Mironov. I met Rich many years ago at ProductCamp Seattle, where he was giving a presentation about the struggles and challenges of the role that really spoke deeply to me and where I […]
Five Common Myths About “Iteration”
Everyone in tech has seen the word, repeated ad nauseum as the “silver bullet” for everything from go-to-market timing to quality to product discovery. But like many terms bandied about by those both within and on the periphery of Product Management, the term “iteration” often comes with connotations or meanings attached to it that aren’t really […]
Measure What Matters
Many people are aware of the famous quote from Peter Drucker, “What gets measured, gets managed.” But what people don’t often consider is that what’s being measured and managed might actually not matter at all at the end of the day. When we measure things that don’t actually drive us to improve, we’re just acting like a […]
When is an MVP *not* an MVP?
For a term that’s so well-established in our profession and so widely used, it always surprises me when people abuse and misuse the concept of Minimum Viable Product (or “MVP”). It seems like such a fundamentally simple and clear concept, but often in practice it gets all wrapped up around the axles of internal struggles, until […]
Struggles With Scrum – It’s About RESULTS
There seems to be a lot of discussion these days about whether or not Agile still works, and whether or not Scrum in particular is “dead” or at the very least dying. The common thread that I see in these discussions is usually something to the effect of “why do we need set iterations” or “user […]