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.
Build Measure Learn
The Build-Measure-Learn loop is a concept coined by Eric Ries in The Lean Startup (Affiliate link) to capture the feedback loop startups use to convert ideas into products. The Build-Measure-Learn loop is an application of the Plan-Do-Study- Act (PDSA) cycle, originally created by Walter Shewhart and advocated by W. Edwards Deming. Organizations have used the …
What do you do with mandated outcomes like staff reductions?
Many times when working on an initiative, you aren’t initially given an outcome to shoot for. The natural thing to do in that situation is to find out what problem you’re trying to solve. So what happens when you do that research and you end up hearing “process efficiency” and when you try to establish …
The benefits and pitfalls of outcomes over outputs
I have a confession to make. I’ve suggested several times that you should focus on outcomes over outputs, but I don’t believe I’ve ever really explained why… Whoops. So now it’s time to correct that oversight. Specifically, I’d like to take a look at the benefits and pitfalls of focusing on outcomes over outputs. But …
How to make sure you’re solving the real problem
A common refrain for product people is to make sure you’re trying to solve a problem, not just deliver a prescribed solution. That is definitely great advice, but how do you know you’re solving the real problem? It’s easy to take a look at a solution you’ve been asked to deliver, such as “I need …
13 Examples of Internal Products
I started using the term internal product mainly for convenience so that I didn’t have to list off a bunch of examples every time I addressed a specific context. I probably take it a step too far when I use the term internal product management to mean the application of product management techniques to internal …
Usability Testing Lessons Learned
As I write this, I’m flying home from the Agile2018 conference in San Diego produced by Agile Alliance. I curate content for Agile Alliance and act as the product owner for the organization’s website so I end up doing a variety of things at the conference. A few months back we ran some surveys to …
What is the difference between customers, users, and stakeholders?
Product development – whether it’s products for sale or internal products – is ultimately an exercise in working with people. To make it fun and interesting, those people have a wide variety of perspectives and have different relationship with the product. Those people are your team (a topic for another blog post) customers, users, and …
Internal Product Management
What Is Internal Product Management To understand what Internal product management is, it’s helpful to start by understanding what product management in general is. For that, I look to Melissa Perri, who provided one of the better definitions of product management (there are plenty) in her Product Institute Class on Product Management: “A product manager …
Product Manager vs Product Owner
One of the things that the agile seems to do consistently is spark a never ending series of “this versus that” debates. Agile vs Waterfall XP vs Scrum Scrum Master vs Project Manager Scrum vs Kanban Scrum vs SAFe The latest debate is product manager vs product owner. Whatever you think of the debate, I …
Is there a Difference Between MVP and MMF?
There are differences between a minimum viable product (MVP) and minimum marketable feature (MMF), but in order to understand the difference, you need to understand the concepts, not just know their names. In this excerpt from Beyond Requirements, I describe both concepts, how they differ, and where they can be useful for product people. Minimum …
3 Examples of actual agile organizations
Photo Credit: https://unsplash.com/@timothymuza We are uncovering better ways of delivering solutions by doing it and helping others do it.-Paraphrase of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development Agile software development is now commonly accepted practice. It’s gotten to the point that when people talk about software development or product management they generally imply you’re using some …
What Jobs to Be Done Teaches us about Interviews
Photo Credit: https://unsplash.com/@alejandroescamilla Over the past week I read through When Coffee and Kale Compete by Alan Klement to get an idea of how Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) can be applied to internal products. JTBD is the idea that people “hire” products in order to get jobs done. There’s an increasing realization that it’s …
Books for Product People
If you are a product manager, product owner, or business analyst, you’ll find this list of books helpful. I know I have. User Story Mapping: Discover The Whole Story, Build the Right Product by Jeff Patton and Peter Economyhttps://bookshop.org/widgets.jsNot only is this book a great resource for Story Mapping, but it provides a meaningful description …
Product People
A recent series of blog posts on KBP.media described different product ownership models. It occurred to me that I made a big assumption throughout the entire series – that everyone reading it was familiar with the roles that I mentioned. I also realized that I left out a role quite prevalent in digital product development …
10 Ways to Determine the Purpose of a Project
The Five Whys Technique (also known as “Popping the Why Stack”) has long been suggested as a way to get to the ultimate reason for a project. But when you ask why repeatedly, you run the risk of looking quite pedantic and annoying stakeholders. With that in mind, I thought I’d provide a list of …