Beyond the BA Role: Charting a Path to Product Ownership
This session explores the perspective and skills necessary to successfully move from business analysis to product ownership.
How do you identify your internal product?
When I meet folks who work on internal products, I often ask “What product do you work on?” I’ve also used that question in workshops to get a feel for the backgrounds and experience of the participants. I frequently get puzzled looks in response to that question and thanks to some feedback from Adrian Reed, …
Who really does internal product management
When I decided InsideProduct should focus on the trials and tribulations that come from working on internal products, I figured I should probably try to get into the heads of the people most directly affected. One group of those people are CIO’s those sometime members of the C- Suite who have struggled over the last …
How to guide delivery decisions with the constraints matrix
A couple of weeks ago, I shared my favorite decision making guide – the decision filter. That tool is particularly helpful when you’re trying to decide what to build, and how to build it. It’s not so helpful when you’re deep in the throes of developing and delivering part of your solution and the crap …
The product lifecycle for internal products
Back in 2019, I was part of a team charged with rebuilding a pricing app for an agriscience company. We started our effort with a six week period of discovery sessions. Everyone on the team was new to the company and the industry, so those sessions helped us understand the business process, business rules, and …
Use decision filters for outcome-based decisions without a metric
In a perfect product world, you’d know the outcome you’re trying to reach, and you’d have a clear metric to guide your decisions to get there. At least that’s what countless product management articles would lead you to believe. Most of my experience has been in a not-so perfect product world – perhaps a big …
Business Analysts are product people too!
This talk introduces the product model, describes “product people” and explains the relevance for business analysts.
Why should business analysts care about product management?
The business analyst title has an identity problem. If you ask 10 business analysts from 10 different companies you’re likely to get a few (up to 10) different descriptions of what they do on a day to day basis. You may hear things such as: Identifying business process changes Eliciting requirements for custom software development …
Helpful techniques for backlog refinement
Over the course of my career, I’ve had the opportunity to work with several different teams. Through all of those experiences, I learned that there are no best practices, but there are a few techniques that I’ve found helpful in just about every situation to figure out the best way to work with any given …
How to refine backlog items with a refinement board
A refinement board is a way for your team to visualize your backlog refinement workflow. It’s a specific form of Kanban board. The columns on the board represent the steps you follow to refine backlog items.
Practical advice about backlog items and outcomes
Last week I shared some tips for maintaining a manageable backlog, I made the following comment about describing “big” backlog items And ideally, you’d describe those items as problems to solve. Depending on your context, that may be easier said than done, which is a typic that deserves it’s own article (coming soon). As promised, …
How to maintain a manageable backlog
Backlogs often get a bad rap because they become a dumping ground for an unorganized collection of things your product team could do. You can attempt to bring order to chaos by avoiding a long list. User Story Mapping is one attempt to organize backlog items that is helpful when you build out things to …
I do use backlogs. I don’t write user stories.
This week has been a bit hectic, so I thought I’d share a couple of potentially contrarian, and hopefully helpful, takes I posted on LinkedIn this week Both of these topics speak to common points of interaction amongst product teams. They are also practices that teams do in a certain way because they think that’s …
Product Strategy for internal products
There are three aspects to product strategy. One you hear about quite a bit, the other two, not as much. All three are important for teams working on internal products. The first aspect is creating your product strategy. You hear about this quite a bit along with a healthy dose of frameworks and ad libs …
Defining the problem to solve helps you avoid waste
Starting off this week is a quote about problem solving often attributed to Albert Einstein, but may have come from the head of the Industrial Engineering department at Yale University: If I had only one hour to solve a problem, I would spend up to two-thirds of that hour in attempting to define what the …