Just in time resources for internal products
When I meet folks who work on internal products, I often ask “What product do you work on?” I’ve also used that question in workshops to get a feel for the backgrounds and experience of the participants. I frequently get puzzled looks in response to that question and thanks to some feedback from Adrian Reed, …
When I decided InsideProduct should focus on the trials and tribulations that come from working on internal products, I figured I should probably try to get into the heads of the people most directly affected. One group of those people are CIO’s those sometime members of the C- Suite who have struggled over the last …
A couple of weeks ago, I shared my favorite decision making guide – the decision filter. That tool is particularly helpful when you’re trying to decide what to build, and how to build it. It’s not so helpful when you’re deep in the throes of developing and delivering part of your solution and the crap …
Back in 2019, I was part of a team charged with rebuilding a pricing app for an agriscience company. We started our effort with a six week period of discovery sessions. Everyone on the team was new to the company and the industry, so those sessions helped us understand the business process, business rules, and …
In a perfect product world, you’d know the outcome you’re trying to reach, and you’d have a clear metric to guide your decisions to get there. At least that’s what countless product management articles would lead you to believe. Most of my experience has been in a not-so perfect product world – perhaps a big …
The business analyst title has an identity problem. If you ask 10 business analysts from 10 different companies you’re likely to get a few (up to 10) different descriptions of what they do on a day to day basis. You may hear things such as: Identifying business process changes Eliciting requirements for custom software development …
Over the course of my career, I’ve had the opportunity to work with several different teams. Through all of those experiences, I learned that there are no best practices, but there are a few techniques that I’ve found helpful in just about every situation to figure out the best way to work with any given …
Last week I shared some tips for maintaining a manageable backlog, I made the following comment about describing “big” backlog items And ideally, you’d describe those items as problems to solve. Depending on your context, that may be easier said than done, which is a typic that deserves it’s own article (coming soon). As promised, …
Backlogs often get a bad rap because they become a dumping ground for an unorganized collection of things your product team could do. You can attempt to bring order to chaos by avoiding a long list. User Story Mapping is one attempt to organize backlog items that is helpful when you build out things to …
This week has been a bit hectic, so I thought I’d share a couple of potentially contrarian, and hopefully helpful, takes I posted on LinkedIn this week Both of these topics speak to common points of interaction amongst product teams. They are also practices that teams do in a certain way because they think that’s …
There are three aspects to product strategy. One you hear about quite a bit, the other two, not as much. All three are important for teams working on internal products. The first aspect is creating your product strategy. You hear about this quite a bit along with a healthy dose of frameworks and ad libs …
Starting off this week is a quote about problem solving often attributed to Albert Einstein, but may have come from the head of the Industrial Engineering department at Yale University: If I had only one hour to solve a problem, I would spend up to two-thirds of that hour in attempting to define what the …
In a previous issue of InsideProduct, I shared the key points from our ProductTank Des Moines/Ames discussion about product discovery. Many of the ideas discussed were applicable to products in general, but mostly assumed products that an organization sells to people outside the organization. In this issue of InsideProduct, I thought it was about time …
Some experiences over the past few months have helped me realize that many problems product teams face do not require an upset the apple cart agile transformation, or overbearing new processes. You can often solve, or even prevent, many problems by being more intentional about how you communicate with people inside and outside your team. …
The term “best practice” is frequently used to describe a process, technique, or practice that was successful for one team, organization or industry and are copied by others who believe if it worked for them, it will work for us. Unfortunately, a practice that works great in one context may not work as well in …
This week, I’m taking a look at delivery as I defined it in the context of the 7D’s. As I’ve mentioned it before, I split it out from development because there is enough involved with getting your users up and running on your internal product that it warrants its own category. Delivery vs launch vs …
This week I want to tackle the activity of development for internal products. Specifically the actual work of developing and testing custom internal products, or configuring and testing off the shelf or SaaS products. Development shouldn’t be a second class activity For some reason, development has gotten a bad rap in the product management community. …
When folks who work in IT think about the various activities involved in developing internal products, one they may not think of immediately is design. And if you talked to product designers, many would probably express more interest in working on a exciting new B2C product rather than the more humdrum internal facing products that …
In the last 2024 issue of InsideProduct, I mentioned that I planned to write more about this in 2025: I figured the best place to start is to explain what this is, and then from there launch into a series of posts looking at each “D” in more detail (as well as a couple of …
Well December certainly didn’t start the way I’d hoped. Towards the end of my trip the week of Thanksgiving, I caught a wicked cold, that while it didn’t knock me completely out, it did limit the amount of time I could be truly productive. So for these past two weeks I had to make some …
First off, thanks to everyone for subscribing to and reading InsideProduct. Whether you’ve been here a while, or just recently subscribed, I appreciate you following along every issue. My family and I are spending the week in Hawaii for some college basketball and the other things you typically do when you’re in Hawaii. One of …
On Tuesday November 19th, ProductTank Des Moines/Ames held a fishbowl discussion focused on Discovery in Product Development. We stocked the fishbowl with Matt Crawford VP of Product at Mural and Catherine (Cat) Schoenthal-Muse, Senior Lead Transformation Coach at Wells Fargo, who bring unique perspectives and insights from their own discovery journeys. Following their introductions, we opened …
If you work in the IT part of your organization and want to improve your relationship with stakeholders, there’s a phrase you should eliminate from your vocabulary. No, it’s not referring to people as resources, although you shouldn’t do that either, unless you want them to act like unthinking automotons. I’m talking about the business. …
There’s been a lot going on this week, so I wasn’t able to set aside the time to write a coherent article about the topic I wanted to cover – ditching “the business”. So instead, I thought I’d provide a quick update into what’s going on and put a request out there. Working On InsideProduct …
