Inside Product
Just in time product management resources
The term stakeholders is often used to categorize everyone that a team works with who is not explicitly a customer or a user of their product. There are a lot of different types of stakeholders that have different interactions with your team. One of the more important types of stakeholders is the Subject Matter Expert …
The Build-Measure-Learn loop is a concept coined by Eric Ries in The Lean Startup (Affiliate link) to capture the feedback loop startups use to convert ideas into products. The Build-Measure-Learn loop is an application of the Plan-Do-Study- Act (PDSA) cycle, originally created by Walter Shewhart and advocated by W. Edwards Deming. Organizations have used the …
Agile has reached, and frankly blazed past buzzword stage. It’s no longer new (the term being applied to software development over 2 decades ago). And there are a lot of different perspectives about what agile is, and isn’t. There’s also a lot of myths and misconceptions about agile practices and techniques. Here’s my attempt to …
Last week I shared a way you can head off bad ideas at the pass. Yes, I know most of you are rarely involved in discussions that early. I can hear you know reading that last post and saying “that’s great Kent, but I’m never in that situation! What do I do when I get …
I know…. I talk a lot about the importance of maximum outcomes with minimum output. And I realize it’s one thing to talk about focusing on outcomes. It’s another thing entirely to actually put that idea into practice. So the next couple of weeks I’m going to take a look at how you can put …
Following is an excerpt from How To Be An Agile Business Analyst, a book that explores how to apply your business analysis skills in an agile manner so that your team solves the right problems with the right solutions. Get the book now to uncover ways to add value to your organization, make your team …
I frequently discuss how to make sure that you’re building the right thing. It’s equally important to make sure that you build the right thing right. How you incorporate testing into the product development process has a big part to play in that. Here’s a description of how my current team approaches testing and dealing …
One thing that people who do product development constantly try to figure out is how to organize to deliver product. There is no one right way to organize the people who are doing product development, but it doesn’t stop teams from looking for that silver bullet product team structure. I’ve written about how product people …
I’m taking a short break from reading through some… uniquely crafted…. stored procedures to write this post. I mention the code archeology because it plays into the topic of the technical product manager role. This current gig has reminded me how much I enjoy digging into the data and business logic required to properly address …
I recently declared that agile transformations aren’t the answer for product development, so why am I exploring who in the organization should instigate an agile adoption? Because there are people in internal product situations who are still in the midst of an agile transformation or are staring down the barrel of another agile transformation (the …
Wait… what? That seems like an odd question to ask on a site for product people, after all some of the people reading this are product owners and the fact you are reading this is a pretty good indication that you are probably engaged. Stick with me for a second…. Product Ownership in Internal Products …
I’m back from Nashville having made it through four days of sun, rain, and country music pretty much no worse for wear (apart from a fouled up sleep pattern that’s slowly getting back to normal). I got the opportunity to get a behind the scenes view of recorded music when I toured Zac Brown’s Southern …
A recent conversation on the Agile Iowa slack group inspired the post for this week. The question basically came down to how do you identify your product for the purposes of which team will own it and who the product owner should be. For small products that you sell, this question is easy. It starts …
When you work in an internal product setting, you’ll often get the opportunity to revisit existing business processes and look for ways to make them more effective. This usually involves finding ways to improve the interactions your customers have with those processes and automating some or all of the process. Some times that work is …
One thing you need to make sure you do as a product manager is keep your stakeholders appraised of what is going on with your product. To make things interesting you most likely have to adjust what you communicate and how you communicate it for different stakeholders. Sometimes those differences in communication are based on …
