Practical ideas for managing business systems
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 …
This week has been a bit hectic, so I thought I’d share a couple of potentially contrarian, and hopefully helpful, takes I posted on LinkedIn this week Both of these topics speak to common points of interaction amongst product teams. They are also practices that teams do in a certain way because they think that’s …
There are three aspects to product strategy. One you hear about quite a bit, the other two, not as much. All three are important for teams working on internal products. The first aspect is creating your product strategy. You hear about this quite a bit along with a healthy dose of frameworks and ad libs …
Starting off this week is a quote about problem solving often attributed to Albert Einstein, but may have come from the head of the Industrial Engineering department at Yale University: If I had only one hour to solve a problem, I would spend up to two-thirds of that hour in attempting to define what the …
In a previous issue of InsideProduct, I shared the key points from our ProductTank Des Moines/Ames discussion about product discovery. Many of the ideas discussed were applicable to products in general, but mostly assumed products that an organization sells to people outside the organization. In this issue of InsideProduct, I thought it was about time …
Some experiences over the past few months have helped me realize that many problems product teams face do not require an upset the apple cart agile transformation, or overbearing new processes. You can often solve, or even prevent, many problems by being more intentional about how you communicate with people inside and outside your team. …
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 …
This week, I’m taking a look at delivery as I defined it in the context of the 7D’s. As I’ve mentioned it before, I split it out from development because there is enough involved with getting your users up and running on your internal product that it warrants its own category. Delivery vs launch vs …
This week I want to tackle the activity of development for internal products. Specifically the actual work of developing and testing custom internal products, or configuring and testing off the shelf or SaaS products. Development shouldn’t be a second class activity For some reason, development has gotten a bad rap in the product management community. …
When folks who work in IT think about the various activities involved in developing internal products, one they may not think of immediately is design. And if you talked to product designers, many would probably express more interest in working on a exciting new B2C product rather than the more humdrum internal facing products that …
In the last 2024 issue of InsideProduct, I mentioned that I planned to write more about this in 2025: I figured the best place to start is to explain what this is, and then from there launch into a series of posts looking at each “D” in more detail (as well as a couple of …
Overview Better. Faster. Cheaper. Many IT organizations are constantly seeking the “best” practices that will deliver those characteristics, and the fact that they continue to search indicates they haven’t found them yet. It could be they are looking in the wrong place. Most efforts around achieving better, faster, cheaper center around becoming ultra efficient. Effectiveness …
Well December certainly didn’t start the way I’d hoped. Towards the end of my trip the week of Thanksgiving, I caught a wicked cold, that while it didn’t knock me completely out, it did limit the amount of time I could be truly productive. So for these past two weeks I had to make some …
First off, thanks to everyone for subscribing to and reading InsideProduct. Whether you’ve been here a while, or just recently subscribed, I appreciate you following along every issue. My family and I are spending the week in Hawaii for some college basketball and the other things you typically do when you’re in Hawaii. One of …
On Tuesday November 19th, ProductTank Des Moines/Ames held a fishbowl discussion focused on Discovery in Product Development. We stocked the fishbowl with Matt Crawford VP of Product at Mural and Catherine (Cat) Schoenthal-Muse, Senior Lead Transformation Coach at Wells Fargo, who bring unique perspectives and insights from their own discovery journeys. Following their introductions, we opened …
