In today’s challenging job market, you need repeatable career habits to thrive in your current role and unlock your next big adventure. Based on Kent’s experience working with teams in a variety of industries, he’s identified three essential career-enhancing habits that will set you apart.
In this session, Kent explains how to position yourself as an indispensable contributor by mastering:
- Impact – connect your work to how money flows through the organization
- Context – match your approach to the moment
- Judgment – make decisions that balance impact and context
Whether you’re looking to advance in your current organization or prepare for the future of work, this session provides practical tools and strategies you can implement immediately. You’ll leave with a clear roadmap for career enhancement and the confidence to navigate the evolving demands of business analysis.
Context Assessment
Use this quick assessment to determine what type of animal your product is and find out how to approach it and address your key uncertainty and complexity risks.
InsideProduct Issues
Three Habits
Organizations keep deciding they can do without business analysts and product owners, first because of agile transformations and now because of AI. This article covers three habits that make the work of an internal product owner harder to overlook, and how they build on each other. It includes examples from Illuminated and a short guide to which habit to pick up first, depending on whether you have a product review coming up, a new product to start, or decisions that have stalled.
Impact
Delivery stories get ignored when funding decisions are made. This article tells how a data platform that saved other teams months of manual data work still had no money story, and why my contract wasn’t renewed. It walks through the three-step Money Story Swap: tell the delivery story, find the money underneath it, and swap the ending. Credit to Rich Mironov for the money story idea.
Context
Projects described as simple often hide complexity and uncertainty. This article tells how a rebuild of a 20-year-old grain pricing application turned into financial infrastructure six weeks in, when the team found requirements nobody had mentioned. It uses Todd Little’s Context Leadership Model and its sheepdog, colt, cow and bull quadrants, and includes an eleven-question assessment that scores complexity and uncertainty separately so you can place your own work.
Judgment
Judgment is the habit of balancing impact and context before deciding what happens next. This article describes an AI proposal workflow where we gave up some speed so a person reviews the customer-specific sections before the final version gets built. It also shares the 5-Question Judgment Check, which I use to decide what to do and who needs to know.
Additional Resources
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.
Impact First Product Teams by Matt LeMay
Context Leadership Model
The Context Leadership Model, created by Todd Little, was introduced in Stand Back and Deliver as a tool for determining the appropriate leadership style given a product’s uncertainty and complexity.
Money Stories by Rich Mironov
Product managers talk about features. Executives talk about revenue. Money Stories are how product and technical leaders translate what they are building into how it will make money and why that work is essential. In terms that their audience understands. Whether you’re pitching a major initiative, defending a roadmap, or trying to avoid adding “just one more thing,” money stories communicate the value of product work.