Inside Product
Just in time product management resources
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 …
Agile2017 happened a couple of weeks ago. Now that I’ve had time to get back in the swing of things, and get the videos published from the conference, I wanted to share some sessions of interest to product people that I attended (or presented). Most of these have videos, and you’ll need to be an …
At dsmAgile2016 Jodi Jones and I led a session titled What do Scrum Masters Really Do? And Do We Need Them? During the session, we asked the attendees to discuss in small groups the things Scrum Masters do. Then, Jodi and I shared some experiences we’ve had in different situations in order to distill some …
Agile2015 is next week in Washington DC so I thought I’d share some ideas for getting the most out of the conference. I shared my 5 tips for getting the most out of the Agile Conference last year (they all still apply) so I thought I’d provide pointers to others thoughts on attending conferences and …
Feedback is an important ingredient to successful projects. One reason teams use iterative approaches, either time boxed sprints or single piece flow, is that they have the opportunity to get frequent and rapid feedback. A few recent experiences have inspired me to think a bit about how helpful feedback can be and some subtle aspects …
I’ve attended or been involved with the Agile2014 conference almost every year since 2004 (I didn’t make the previous visit to Orlando in 2010). Through all of those experiences, I’ve learned a lot of lessons, some more painfully than others, about how to get the most out of the conference. I thought it would be …
I found the following on Liz Keogh’s site and found that I agreed with it quite strongly. To show my agreement, I’m posting it here. I am a member of a community of thinkers. I believe that communities exist as homes for professionals to learn, teach, and reflect on their work. I challenge each community …
A recent experience I had made me wonder why we come up with new labels for things and what we hope to accomplish with them. In this case, it was the idea that Chris Matts originally came up with and calls Feature Injection. What it really means is to focus analysis efforts in the opposite …
I’m sitting in an airport lounge waiting for my delayed flight – the pilot for my flight is on another flight that was already delayed… go figure – going through emails from the past couple of days. I just hit a 15 email conversation between three people but including a group of about 20. I …
I felt the need to climb on to my soap box for a few minutes. As agile has become more and more mainstream, and risen higher in the buzzword index a fairly interesting misconception has appeared with respect to categorization. It seems that whenever agile is mentioned, authors feel this odd compunction to treat agile …
Scaling Up Excellence: Mindsets, Decisions, and Principles – Bob Sutton Tuesday at Agile 2012 started off with a keynote from Bob Sutton, Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Standford University and author of Good Boss Bad Boss and The No Asshole Rule. His talk centered around some thoughts for scaling up excellence based on …
Is It Worth It? Using a Business Value Model to Guide Decisions – Kent McDonald Monday at Agile 2012 started off with the opportunity for me to present my session Is It Worth It? Using a Business Value Model to Guide Decisions. I’d like to start off by thanking everyone that attended the session, provided …
The Scrum Master from a team I was coaching recently asked me to provide a list of 5 things, that above else the team should remember when going forward and when a coach was no longer present. I thought this list would be helpful for others to do as well, so I thought I would …
I recently saw probably the best description of agile I have ever seen, from PMNetwork, the magazine of the Project Management Institute. The article discusses the agile movement 10 years after the signing of the Agile Manifesto, and interviewed four of the signatories in order to get an informed perspective. In response to a question …
“Too much fun? What’s that mean? It’s like too much money, there’s no such thing” Trace Adkins “I Ain’t Never Had Too Much Fun” On an agile project, is there possibly such a thing as too much collaboration? Collaboration is one of the cornerstones of the agile mindset. We’re reminded about it in several places: …
A key aspect of real options is knowing when to make a decision. If you are facing the need to decide, determine when you have to make the decision and use the intervening time to gather as much information as possible. That way, when you An excellent example of decision timing is the flight of …
After an inexcusably long delay, here is another post on one of the sessions from Agile 2011. This one, Agile Thinking for Business Analysis: Going Beyond User Stories was presented by Steve Adolph & Shane Hastie. The premise of the session was that although User Stories are the “industry standard” way of documenting requirements in …
Steve Denning, a former world bank executive and author gave two presentations at Agile 2011, both of which were of extreme relevance and importance for business analysis practitioners. I was able to attend both and found in this case at least, we were able to schedule across stages in the right order. His Making the …
The first session I attended was Jez Humble’s Applying the Lean Startup Model to the Enterprise. This session introduced the Lean Startup Model and discussed how the concepts could be applied to larger more established organizations, specifically how to organize development and operations. About the talk If you are not familiar with lean startup, don’t …
The first keynote at the Agile 2011 Conference was Barbara Frederickson, a professor at UNC Chapel Hill, who has done a great deal of work on the impact of positive emotions. In her talk Why Care about Positive Emotions, she discussed how positive emotions can change people’s physiology and impact their effectiveness at work, in …
On June 15th, I had the opportunity to speak to a group of business analysts who had a lot of questions about agile. I had been asked to give a 45 minute overview of agile and was provided a sample list of questions for the presentation would cover. I quickly realized that I would never …
Question: How do you learn about the agile approach? How does a BA learn to manage the agile approach? Find a good coach. Become part of a team that has done it before, or is doing it. Do it. Sometimes the simplest answers are the best.
