Inside Product
Just in time product management resources
There’s a wide variety of roles that product people play in their organization. Along with common roles such as product management and business analysis, a new role that is starting to become more prevalent is delivery lead. Because the role is fairly new, I thought it would be helpful to examine the role, identify its …
Agile has reached, and frankly blazed past buzzword stage. It’s no longer new (the term being applied to software development over 2 decades ago). And there are a lot of different perspectives about what agile is, and isn’t. There’s also a lot of myths and misconceptions about agile practices and techniques. Here’s my attempt to …
One thing that people who do product development constantly try to figure out is how to organize to deliver product. There is no one right way to organize the people who are doing product development, but it doesn’t stop teams from looking for that silver bullet product team structure. I’ve written about how product people …
I’m taking a short break from reading through some… uniquely crafted…. stored procedures to write this post. I mention the code archeology because it plays into the topic of the technical product manager role. This current gig has reminded me how much I enjoy digging into the data and business logic required to properly address …
Wait… what? That seems like an odd question to ask on a site for product people, after all some of the people reading this are product owners and the fact you are reading this is a pretty good indication that you are probably engaged. Stick with me for a second…. Product Ownership in Internal Products …
A recent conversation on the Agile Iowa slack group inspired the post for this week. The question basically came down to how do you identify your product for the purposes of which team will own it and who the product owner should be. For small products that you sell, this question is easy. It starts …
One thing you need to make sure you do as a product manager is keep your stakeholders appraised of what is going on with your product. To make things interesting you most likely have to adjust what you communicate and how you communicate it for different stakeholders. Sometimes those differences in communication are based on …
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 …
You’ve decided you want to learn more about product ownership. You may be new to a product owner role. You may have recently done a personal retrospective and identified learning more about product ownership as one of the things you wanted to start doing. There are a lot of options out there, So Where do …
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 …
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 …
Have you ever been confused about whether a product backlog item is an epic, feature, or user story? Ever questioned whether you needed themes? As long as your team understands what the product backlog item means when you start to work on it, you really shouldn’t care if it’s called an epic, feature or user …
I suspect you didn’t start your career with the goal to be a product owner. You may have started as a developer, a subject matter expert from a business unit, or a business analyst. Regardless of your background, once you start product ownership, you need to practice three habits to be an effective product owner: …
I was talking with a group of product owners the other day and mentioned that one of the hallmarks of good product people is they know how to say “no” often, without getting fired. I couldn’t get away with making a statement like that without explaining how you could actually do that. Fair enough. Here’s …
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 …
I recently wrote an article to explain how I describe user stories. Since I published that article, I’ve received a request for more information on feature refinement, so I thought I would describe how I approach that in a bit of detail. What is a Feature Before I dive in too deep it’s helpful to …
A question that I see often is: How do you (Should you | Can you) use user stories to properly document requirements for a product? There are some people nodding in agreement “yes, I’ve often wondered that myself.” There are others who are cringing. User stories weren’t intended to be requirements. Kent Beck originally came …
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 …
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 …
The success of products and initiatives is highly correlated with well-informed, timely decisions. As a result, decision making is one of three key activities of product ownership. When you’re the person on the team responsible for product ownership, you make sure that decisions get made. These decisions range from broad decisions about the entire product …
Imagine this scenario… The Director of Sales Operations (the Director) just asked you to implement a new system to support the sales bonus program. The Director started the effort and identified key aspects of the program, but realized she can’t pay the proper amount of time to the implementation. She has asked you to take …
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 …
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 …
Description In this model, product responsibilities are split between three or more roles: a product manager and a product owner in the business and one or more business analysts who report up through IT. This model seems to have some inefficiencies in it, however it is quite common, especially in internal product settings. Typically the …
