Just in time resources for internal products
If you regularly work with product teams in a business analyst or product owner role, I’m going to guess that you’ve struggled to figure out the proper level of detail for your requirements. It didn’t matter if you wrote epic requirements documents (which were probably too long and didn’t have the right detail) or a …
Next time you find yourself in a room of product people and agile coaches ask the question “should you have both product managers and product owners?” You’ll be sure to start a discussion with a lot of sound and fury that resolves absolutely nothing. InsideProduct is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support …
This week’s been a busy one with work and a quick workcation to Denver to see Imagine Dragons at Red Rocks Amphitheater. Great location, great band. Here’s a sampling… But it didn’t feel right to skip a week, so I thought this was a great time to share some of my recent podcast appearances. Thanks …
The first week of October, I presented a session at IBADD about backlog refinement. Before the session started, I asked the attendees to write on post it notes what they hoped to learn. That activity serves a couple of purposes. It gives me insights into how people interpreted the intent of the session, it indicates …
I originally wrote this article for Project Connections, one of my first outlets for article writing that sadly is no longer around. Fortunately, I was able to get all of my pieces back from the site and am able to freshen up my favorites for republishing. Enjoy! There are a few activities surrounding project work …
If you’re familiar with retrospectives you probably think of them as a way for your team to pause, reflect on how the last couple of weeks went and make adjustments to your team’s ways of working. That’s usually how I think of them also. Then this week I had the chance to experience a new …
Recently a connection on LinkedIn asked me an interesting question: After working as a Business Analyst and Project Manager for several years, I’ve discovered that many of my previous tasks actually fit the Product Owner role perfectly. So yesterday I applied for a Product Owner role. I’m hoping you can provide a pros/cons overview to …
For the last few weeks, I’ve explored what prioritization looks like in a variety of different scenarios. This week finished up that series with a look at how you can go about prioritizing a bunch of stakeholder requests. This is a common scenario when you’ve already built software for your company (ie internal product) and …
As I describe prioritization approaches in different scenarios, I thought I’d share an example from my past – revising the search functionality on agilealliance.org. I wrote this when I was on staff at Agile Alliance, so there’s a chance it’s changed since I wrote this, but the approach is still valid. You can also read …
Last week, we talked about how to prioritize your new product development efforts when you’re trying to get to product market fit. Once you hit that sought after milestone, your product moves into the growth stage of the product life cycle and you switch into product optimization. So it makes sense that optimization is the …
Here’s the next in a series of issues on prioritization. This week’s issue looks at prioritization when you build a new product. Some people refer to this as going from 0 → 1. In the world of internal products, you can think of this as what you need to do to enable a brand new …
A couple weeks ago, I sent out an overview of key points product teams should consider when making prioritization decisions. In that overview I promised to explore different scenarios in more depth. So here’s the first scenario – replacing an existing product. Product replacements are a common activity these days, especially for organizations undergoing a …
Last week, I sent out an overview of key points product teams should consider when making prioritization decisions. And promised to follow up that issue with dives into specific contexts. I also encouraged readers to reply with questions and suggest scenarios. One of the emails I received had a great question about prioritization in a …
An Overview on Priority Prioritization, or more specifically deciding what you will and will not build, is a key product management activity. It’s equally important for a tech product that your company sells as it is for an internal product that enables your company’s business processes. You could even say that it is the most …
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 …
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 …
One of the interesting (challenging?) aspects of product management is how every organization seems to have its own interpretation of what a product manager actually should do. It gets even more jumbled in those organizations that are trying to adopt product management for internal products and in their IT organizations. I don’t think you’re ever …
A company I’m working with right now has a periodic product management book club meeting. For the last meeting, we discussed Sense & Respond, How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden. I suggested Sense & Respond because it provides a great explanation of what organizations …
When organizations go through some form of transformation, they inevitably end up with people who they aren’t sure how they fit in the organizational structure. In other words… Move out or move over Sometimes, especially when organizations get transformation help from accounting firms turned consultancies, they get rid of just about everyone in a particular …
I’ve heard it said that the main purpose of managing up is to make your boss’s life easier. Sometimes, making their life easier means making your own life more difficult, at least temporarily. One of those times is when you need to say “no” to your boss. You’re probably thinking “I can see where saying …
This newsletter is a little late this week because I’m with friends in Napa, celebrating my wife’s birthday. (It’s a significant one). As you might expect, we’re visiting wineries while we’re out here, and we’re trying to visit small, family run wineries. The experience is unique; the wine is pretty damn good, and stories of …
I suspect if you asked a collection of people who work in IT, you’d get just as many people who say that designers aren’t necessary as you do people who say they are. I’d suggest the former group is wrong. I’ve always had the impression that internal products can gain a great deal from the …
When you read an article on software product management, do you immediately think “that’s a great idea, I’m going to try it out right away!” Or do you think “that’s great for that type of product/company, but it will never work where I’m at?” If you frequently have the latter reaction, chances are you’re reading …
