The roles product people play
This post explores the product roles and titles of business analyst, product owner, and product manager and how they relate in both internal and external settings.
Finance and Accounting for Internal Products
If your organization is going through the transition from projects to products for its internal software development efforts, you may ask
How is product funding /financial tracking supposed to work? The question is important, and is difficult to answer because it entails regulations, accounting principles, interpretations of those regulations and principles, software development theory, and two groups with different, but not conflicting, goals.
Impact Mapping
What Is Impact Mapping? Impact mapping combines mind mapping and strategic planning to help a team explore what behaviors they should try to influence in order to reach a particular objective. Teams use impact maps to discuss assumptions, align with organizational objectives, and develop greater focus in their projects by delivering only the things that …
Business Analysts Can Be Product People
Product management roles offer a viable career path for business analysts, especially those who work on custom software development efforts. Here are the stories of four people who made the shift.
This meeting should be an email, but will people read it?
Have you ever been in a meeting where the thought crossed your mind that “this meeting should have been an email.” There are plenty of meetings that fit that description. So many in fact that a cottage industry has grown up offering swag to celebrate the fact. (This is an affiliate link. Since I didn’t …
Story Splitting
What Is Story Splitting Story splitting is the act of examining a large backlog item and splitting it into smaller backlog items that provide value and can be delivered in a short time frame. You can consider story splitting to be a planning technique that helps you organize your backlog into manageable chunks. You can …
Example Mapping
What Is Example Mapping Example Mapping is a backlog refinement technique that helps you structure your team’s conversation around a backlog item. The conversation focuses on drawing out all of the relevant acceptance criteria (or rules), related scenarios and pertinent questions associated with the backlog item you are discussing. An example mapping session identifies: An …
Usability Testing
What Is Usability Testing Usability testing is a way to test how intuitive the design, user flows and content is in your product, app or website. This form of testing consists of asking real people who are similar to potential users to perform various tasks on your product. You can use the information gained from …
Sprint Reviews
What Is A Sprint Review The Sprint Review is a discussion at the end of a sprint intended to review what the team accomplished in the sprint (including demonstrating done functionality), get feedback, and determine what, if any changes should happen in the team’s plan moving forward. These changes usually consist of revisions to the …
Product Roadmap
What is a product roadmap A product roadmap is a statement of intent for how you are going to implement your strategy. The product roadmap is a living thing that indicates your best understanding at the point that you last updated it and it also reflects whatever uncertainty you faced when you last put it …
Working backwards in business intelligence
Most information systems are intended to accept, process, and provide information to either support a business process, or to provide information that people in the organization use to make decisions or to answer questions. Business intelligence (BI) efforts often start to allow users to meld information from multiple systems, or arrange data in a way …
AMA: IIBA Hyderabad
On Friday, May 29, 2020 I did a Fireside Chat with the Hyderabad Chapter of International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA). Here are the questions that came up during the session along with my answers. I answered some of these questions during the session so these answers reflect what I would say having time to …
What is a delivery lead?
There’s a wide variety of roles that product people play in their organization. Along with common roles such as product management and business analysis, a new role that is starting to become more prevalent is delivery lead. Because the role is fairly new, I thought it would be helpful to examine the role, identify its …
A product person’s guide to remote product teams
When you work with remote product teams, you want to have a shared understanding about the problem you’re trying to solve and what your solution is supposed to look like. You want to be able to effectively collaborate with everyone on the team to make sure everyone keeps heading in the right direction and makes …
Discovery Sessions: Start an initiative off right
What are discovery sessions If you’ve been reading InsideProduct for a while, you’ve probably picked up by now that I focus on solving the right problem and ignore everything else. I’ve found that one, or a small series of, discovery sessions is an excellent way to identify what that problem is and also understand the …