Business Analysts are product people too!
This talk introduces the product model, describes “product people” and explains the relevance for business analysts.
How to refine backlog items with a refinement board
A refinement board is a way for your team to visualize your backlog refinement workflow. It’s a specific form of Kanban board. The columns on the board represent the steps you follow to refine backlog items.
Filters not Buckets – prioritization for product teams
Prioritization, or more specifically deciding what you will and will not build, is a key decision teams make on a regular basis. Yet many teams use ineffective approaches to prioritization that add more confusion than clarity, and leave teams focusing on who screams loudest. In this lightning talk, Kent McDonald shares some key prioritization tips …
Business Analysis in an Agile Context: Tips, Tricks & Pitfalls
On June 30,2020 I recorded a webinar with Adrian Reed for Blackmetric Business Solutions. It was a wide ranging discussion driven by questions from the audience around all things business analysis and agile. Here are my responses to the questions asked during that session.
How To Survive and Thrive in a Digital Transformation
This presentation explains how business analysis contributes to successful digital transformations. You’ll also find out how to tell if you’re in a digital transformation in name only and find out how you can make the best of that situation with techniques that are helpful in both circumstances.
Business Rules
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 …
Innovation
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 …
Competitive Gap Analysis
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 …
Product Requirements
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. …
Business Case
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 …
Portfolio Planning
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 …
Opportunity Discovery
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 …
Product Vision
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.
Feature Prioritization
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 …
Moving from Business Analyst to Product Owner to Product Manager
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.