Just in time resources for internal products
In today’s challenging job market, you need strategic career moves to thrive in your current role and unlock your next big adventure. Based on my experience working with teams in a variety of industries, I have identified three essential career-enhancing strategies that will set you apart. In this session I will explain how to position …
A set of discovery techniques from the worlds of business analysis and product management.
Overview If you want the solution you’re building to meet its desired outcome, you need product people, testers, and developers to have a shared understanding of what that solution is. That includes knowing how the solution should behave in key situations. Conversations are an effective way to build that shared understanding. You may wonder who …
This session explores the perspective and skills necessary to successfully move from business analysis to product ownership.
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 …
This talk introduces the product model, describes “product people” and explains the relevance for business analysts.
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 …
A refinement board is a way for your team to visualize your backlog refinement workflow. It’s a specific form of Kanban board. The columns on the board represent the steps you follow to refine backlog items.
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 …
