Just in time resources for internal products
If you’re a longtime reader of InsideProduct, you’re familiar with the idea that business analysts are product people and can move into product management roles. One reason I believe that is because business analysis is an important subset of product management for dealing with requirements and business rules. Business rules play a big part in …
I have a love/hate relationship with the term innovation. I love the idea of taking creative approaches to build competitive advantage with your product. I hate it when product teams innovate for the sake of innovating, especially when they work on parity products. You can think of this as taking a differentiating approach to a parity …
Photo by Suad Kamardeen on Unsplash When you’re deciding what to include and exclude from your product, there are a variety of factors you need to consider. Hopefully, the first thing that comes to mind is customer needs. If not, we need to have a chat… But there are other factors to consider, and one that presents a …
Documentation… is there anything else related to software product development that so few people enjoy creating but so many rely on? Yeah… I didn’t think so. One of the more controversial documents is the Product Requirements Document (PRD). Done correctly, it helps your team build a shared understanding of the solution you’re trying to build. …
Organizations frequently have to decide which opportunities to pursue or forego, and they often ask product teams to put together business cases to help decide. Here’s a collection of resources about how business cases help teams and organizations choose which products to pursue and some suggestions on how to put those business cases together. Business …
Organizations that have more than a single product need to decide what to invest and when in each product. Here’s a collection of resources about how best to split your available people and money across multiple products so that you’re not forced to narrow your collection down to a single one. What Is Product Portfolio …
Why opportunity discovery is important If you work on internal products or in an IT setting, you may think of discovery as a cooler term for eliciting requirements I know I was guilty of that line of thinking in the past. And I’m pretty sure I came to that conclusion because I worked in contexts …
A good product vision keeps your product team focused on the long-term, helps align your product team’s decision making, and helps you get leadership buy in.
Stop me if you’ve experienced this before. You’re sitting at your desk staring at the 1,000 items in your backlog. How on earth can you possibly decide which one you’re going to do first? Overwhelmed by the sheer number of things you could do, you end up defaulting to doing the thing requested by the …
Learn how to go from a business analyst job to a role as a product owner or product manager based on the experience of those who've done it.
Do you work at a company switching from a project to a product approach (ie undergoing a product transformation)? If so, and that company is in an industry that doesn’t actually sell software products, you most likely work on internal products, or you’re an IT Product Manager. You may also not really care what it’s …
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.
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 ignoring everything else. I’ve found that one, or a small series of discovery sessions are an excellent way to identify what that problem is and also understand the constraints you have on …
If you build your product roadmap based on outcomes, you have an idea of which problems you’re planning to tackle now, next, and later but you probably don’t have clarity on exactly how you’re going to solve those problems. And that is perfectly ok. You need to be able to identify different options for solving …
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 …
