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Business Rules

December 11, 2023 by Kent McDonald

If you’re a longtime reader of InsideProduct, you’re familiar with the idea that business analysts are product people and can move into product management roles. One reason I believe that is because business analysis is an important subset of product management for dealing with requirements and business rules. Business rules play a big part in …

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Innovation

November 28, 2023 by Kent McDonald

I have a love/hate relationship with the term innovation. I love the idea of taking creative approaches to build competitive advantage with your product. I hate it when product teams innovate for the sake of innovating, especially when they work on parity products. You can think of this as taking a differentiating approach to a parity …

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Competitive Gap Analysis

October 30, 2023 by Kent McDonald

Photo by Suad Kamardeen on Unsplash​ When you’re deciding what to include and exclude from your product, there are a variety of factors you need to consider. Hopefully, the first thing that comes to mind is customer needs. If not, we need to have a chat… But there are other factors to consider, and one that presents a …

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Product Requirements

October 17, 2023 by Kent McDonald

Documentation… is there anything else related to software product development that so few people enjoy creating but so many rely on? Yeah… I didn’t think so. One of the more controversial documents is the Product Requirements Document (PRD). Done correctly, it helps your team build a shared understanding of the solution you’re trying to build. …

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Business Case

September 1, 2023 by Kent McDonald

Organizations frequently have to decide which opportunities to pursue or forego, and they often ask product teams to put together business cases to help decide. Here’s a collection of resources about how business cases help teams and organizations choose which products to pursue and some suggestions on how to put those business cases together. Business …

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Portfolio Planning

August 18, 2023 by Kent McDonald

Organizations that have more than a single product need to decide what to invest and when in each product. Here’s a collection of resources about how best to split your available people and money across multiple products so that you’re not forced to narrow your collection down to a single one. What Is Product Portfolio …

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Opportunity Discovery

July 21, 2023 by Kent McDonald

Why opportunity discovery is important If you work on internal products or in an IT setting, you may think of discovery as a cooler term for eliciting requirements I know I was guilty of that line of thinking in the past. And I’m pretty sure I came to that conclusion because I worked in contexts …

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Product Vision

July 7, 2023 by Kent McDonald

A good product vision keeps your product team focused on the long-term, helps align your product team’s decision making, and helps you get leadership buy in.

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Feature Prioritization

June 23, 2023 by Kent McDonald

Stop me if you’ve experienced this before. You’re sitting at your desk staring at the 1,000 items in your backlog. How on earth can you possibly decide which one you’re going to do first? Overwhelmed by the sheer number of things you could do, you end up defaulting to doing the thing requested by the …

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The roles product people play

April 11, 2023 by Kent McDonald

This post explores the product roles and titles of business analyst, product owner, and product manager and how they relate in both internal and external settings.

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Finance and Accounting for Internal Products

April 10, 2023 by Kent McDonald

If your organization is going through the transition from projects to products for its internal software development efforts, you may ask
How is product funding /financial tracking supposed to work? The question is important, and is difficult to answer because it entails regulations, accounting principles, interpretations of those regulations and principles, software development theory, and two groups with different, but not conflicting, goals.

Read moreFinance and Accounting for Internal Products

A product person’s guide to remote product teams

April 6, 2020 by Kent McDonald

When you work with remote product teams, you want to have a shared understanding about the problem you’re trying to solve and what your solution is supposed to look like. You want to be able to effectively collaborate with everyone on the team to make sure everyone keeps heading in the right direction and makes …

Read moreA product person’s guide to remote product teams

Technique Briefs

September 20, 2018 by Kent McDonald

In the spirit of just-in-time resources, here’s a collection of the simple, yet powerful, techniques that you can use to be a more effective product person.

Read moreTechnique Briefs

Thanks for Subscribing

April 16, 2014 by Kent McDonald

Thanks for subscribing to Inside Product, a weekly collection of hand picked resources to help you deliver powerful internal products. As a result of subscribing, you also get a copy Product Ownership in the Wild, an ebook that takes a look at how organizations actually organize their product people. If you get a chance, please …

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