Inside Product
Just in time product management resources
I keep a casual eye on a variety of LinkedIn Discussion groups. A couple of years ago, I chimed in on a discussion on the Business Analyst Times Linked In Group posing the question “Why do very good Business Analysts NOT want to become Project Managers ? Let’s discuss the reasons for this.“ My first …
I like to think of myself as an entrepreneur. My business mostly consists of some form of consulting, and when I consult it usually has something to do with business analysis. That combination of perspectives certainly colors my thinking and causes me to see connections between those different domains. For example, I have often thought …
A recent conversation with a friend got me thinking of the reason why many organizations are choosing to adopt agile, and how they may be setting themselves up disappointment. When organizations approach me for help adopting agile software development, one of the first things I do is ask “Why?” The usual answer is that they …
I originally introduced Arthur in this article for Agile Connections. Arthur is a middle manager and product owner in a medium-sized insurance company who has been assigned to take on an agile project. For those unfamiliar with agile, the terminology and techniques of agile approaches can seem strange and often a little silly when not …
Organizations are impacted on a daily basis by decisions made by people at every level. Even the most minute seeming tactical decisions can have an impact on the overall organization. Successful organizations realize this and look for ways to align the decision making at all parts of the organization so that the people who are …
I’m in the midst of a two week stretch of conferencing. The week of October 29 – November 2nd I was at the Building Business Capability Conference in Fort Lauderdale. The conference markets itself as 5 different conferences for the price of 1 and even goes to the trouble of creating the concept of five …
A recent experience I had made me wonder why we come up with new labels for things and what we hope to accomplish with them. In this case, it was the idea that Chris Matts originally came up with and calls Feature Injection. What it really means is to focus analysis efforts in the opposite …
On October 1, 2012, I’m speaking at the Agile Testing & BDD eXchange, a one-day conference jam-packed with talks, open-space discussions and brainstorming about the latest innovative ideas, tools and practices in Agile Testing and BDD. You can see the full program here! A distinguishing characteristic of a Skills Matter conference is their insistence on …
I’m sitting in an airport lounge waiting for my delayed flight – the pilot for my flight is on another flight that was already delayed… go figure – going through emails from the past couple of days. I just hit a 15 email conversation between three people but including a group of about 20. I …
I felt the need to climb on to my soap box for a few minutes. As agile has become more and more mainstream, and risen higher in the buzzword index a fairly interesting misconception has appeared with respect to categorization. It seems that whenever agile is mentioned, authors feel this odd compunction to treat agile …
Scaling Up Excellence: Mindsets, Decisions, and Principles – Bob Sutton Tuesday at Agile 2012 started off with a keynote from Bob Sutton, Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Standford University and author of Good Boss Bad Boss and The No Asshole Rule. His talk centered around some thoughts for scaling up excellence based on …
Is It Worth It? Using a Business Value Model to Guide Decisions – Kent McDonald Monday at Agile 2012 started off with the opportunity for me to present my session Is It Worth It? Using a Business Value Model to Guide Decisions. I’d like to start off by thanking everyone that attended the session, provided …
These days I deliver more training classes than I attend. That’s not because I think I can’t learn anything new – I’m probably at a higher state of enlightened ignorance than I have ever been – It’s because that’s a big part of how I make a living. Thankfully, I am able to learn things …
Analysts are inherently problem solvers. A couple of days ago, I came across a resource that appears, at first blush at least, to be indispensable for analysts when solving problems related to organizations and groups of people. Chris McGoff identified a set of patterns about group behavior that help to address team or organizational problems. …
I ran across a blog post today entitled Be a meeting whisperer: Conflict Management 101 that I found to be particularly relevant for analysts. It’s about using one of many ideas called PRIMEs to help manage change. While I find the PRIMES concept interesting and will dig more into them later, I wanted to share …
