Inside Product
Just in time product management resources
I am preparing a presentation called Inconvenient Truths in IT Projects where I plan to discuss some aspects of software development that are prevalent and need to be discussed, but people don’t like to talk about in polite company. Some of the topics I’m throwing around: No matter how hard you try, your estimates will …
Last fall I worked with Addison-Wesley Profession to create a set of LiveLessons to provide additional coverage of the techniques described in Part 3 of Beyond Requirements: Analysis with an Agile Mindset. Analysis Techniques for Product Owners LiveLessons is a video training course providing methods for understanding project stakeholders, the organizational context in which a …
I’m writing this as I fly home from the Agile2015 conference, or what Jake Calabrese rightfully calls “summer camp.” I headed into the week planning to focus on sessions related to product ownership or one of it’s related fields, as I described a couple of weeks ago. As a result I found myself attending several …
Agile2015 is next week in Washington DC so I thought I’d share some ideas for getting the most out of the conference. I shared my 5 tips for getting the most out of the Agile Conference last year (they all still apply) so I thought I’d provide pointers to others thoughts on attending conferences and …
Another Way to Say “Building The Right Thing” Successful software product development and IT Projects face a constant, and healthy tension – you want to build the right thing, you want to build the thing right, and you want to build the thing fast so you can get more feedback. (Thanks to Henrik Kniberg’s excellent …
A friend of mine is an agile coach for a large software product company. When she coaches teams, product owners, and managers she stresses that teams need to feel ownership for their work. She likes to teach product owners and other leaders to lead through the use of questions, and has compiled a list of …
What Are Acceptance Criteria Acceptance criteria are the conditions that a solution must satisfy to be accepted by a user, a customer, or, in the case of system-level functionality, the consuming system. They are also a set of statements, each with a clear pass/fail result, that specify both functional and nonfunctional requirements and are applicable …
As I look to supplement my understanding of product ownership I have found a set of resources to be very helpful. The collection of blogs and newsletters listed below are primary sources I use for topics such as product management and user experience where I do not have as much experience as I do in …
Feedback is an important ingredient to successful projects. One reason teams use iterative approaches, either time boxed sprints or single piece flow, is that they have the opportunity to get frequent and rapid feedback. A few recent experiences have inspired me to think a bit about how helpful feedback can be and some subtle aspects …
About a month ago I was honored to talk with Dave Saboe on his Mastering Business Analysis Podcast. We talked about my forthcoming (for a while now) book Beyond Requirements: Analysis with an Agile Mindset and other things analysis and agile. Thanks to Dave for having me on his podcast. Here are a variety of …
Feature Injection is a very helpful process framework created by Chris Matts that is not explicitly used as much as it probably should. I suspect the main reason it is not adopted more is because people don’t really understand what it’s all about. There are several articles and blog posts that explain feature injection, but …
At the start of 2014, I joined a common trend and made a series of predictions about the upcoming year (2014) in the business analysis world. Unlike most others, I reflected back on those predictions to see how I did. The verdict? Meh. Even with my less than inspiring predictive abilities, I’ve been asked to …
The Five Whys Technique (also known as “Popping the Why Stack”) has long been suggested as a way to get to the ultimate reason for a project. But when you ask why repeatedly, you run the risk of looking quite pedantic and annoying stakeholders. With that in mind, I thought I’d provide a list of …
Originally published on B2T Training BA Blog. One of my favorite aspects of adopting an agile mindset is the tendency to think about whether what I am doing actually adds value to the organization. With this though, comes the knotty problem that value can often be hard to clearly define. Because I generally find myself …
I’ve attended or been involved with the Agile2014 conference almost every year since 2004 (I didn’t make the previous visit to Orlando in 2010). Through all of those experiences, I’ve learned a lot of lessons, some more painfully than others, about how to get the most out of the conference. I thought it would be …
