A very common challenge faced by Product Managers of all experience levels is understanding and implementing some form of repeatable process around prioritization. Some people take a very light approach, making decisions based on their own experience, data, and beliefs about the direction of the product. Others take a much more rigorous approach, applying scorecards […]
Proper Care and Feeding of Your Product Backlog
One of the least glamorous parts of Agile development for most Product Managers is the process of backlog grooming. It can be a challenge to get teams to engage when they’re in the middle of a sprint, it can be difficult to convince stakeholders to refer to the backlog instead of the Product Manager for […]
“Product” is More Than Just Development
It’s far too common in the world of Product Management for us to wind up being narrowly focused on the actual product development cycle – define, build, measure, repeat. But there’s far more to building, launching, and maintaining a successful product than just what goes on between Product Management and Development. The best and most […]
What is the Value of Agility?
One of the many challenges that Product Managers face in trying to move organizations toward a more agile approach to product development is that some stakeholders simply don’t see the value in the shift. They believe that, since their way has worked for them for so long that there’s no need to change — after […]
Are You “Default Ship” or “Default Delay”?
A couple years ago I ran across a blog post by Paul Jackson where he mentioned in passing the idea of a tension between “default ship” cultures in relation to corporations versus startups. For some reason, those two ends of a spectrum have stuck with me ever since, and after struggling with some culture change […]
How Much Technical Debt is Too Much?
Let’s face it, technical debt is something that every Product Manager has to deal with on a constant basis — whether it’s making snap decisions that unblock your team so that they can keep working, short-cutting an ideal architectural solution because you have time-to-market pressures, or deciding to put off working on bugs found after […]
The Product Lifecycle
This post comes courtesy of a direct request from one of my supporters over at Patreon, who asked me if I could give them a 10,000 foot-level overview of the Product Lifecycle from ideation to delivery. While nothing here should be terribly earth-shattering or world-changing, I think it’s important for us as Product Managers to […]
New Year, New Perspectives
So, another year is starting up, and we’re just now starting to unpack ourselves from the holiday break that so many of us take time to enjoy with our families and friends. The best thing about a new year is that the future really is a blank slate, 365 days to make of them what […]
How to “Level Up” Your Product Management Skillset
A common theme in online discussions and forums around Product Management lies in how to level up our skills and be a better Product Manager. While there are a lot of different options available, just as there are as many different aspects of Product Management to focus on, there are some very specific areas that […]
The Dangerous Myth of “Consensus”
As Product Managers, we’re often involved in making decisions and driving others to decisions that need to be made — sometimes dragging them kicking and screaming toward the future. And in doing so, there’s often an undercurrent of “reaching consensus” that runs through discussions and permeates meetings comprised of varying people with a wide breadth […]
INVEST in Your User Stories!
I’ve touched on User Stories on several occasions, my favorite being Why Your User Stories Suck! Today I’m here to share with you a very common, yet very commonly overlooked, way to check each and every User Story on your backlog to see whether or not it’s really “ready” for your Dev teams. One of […]
Leading Through Influence: Limiting Choices
I was working with a future mentee last week and we noticed a recurring theme to some of our discussions — that a large part of good Product Management results from limiting the number of choices that our teams and our executives have to choose from, so that they make decisions that reflect the actual […]