Practical ideas for managing business systems
If you work in the IT part of your organization and want to improve your relationship with stakeholders, there’s a phrase you should eliminate from your vocabulary. No, it’s not referring to people as resources, although you shouldn’t do that either, unless you want them to act like unthinking automotons. I’m talking about the business. …
There’s been a lot going on this week, so I wasn’t able to set aside the time to write a coherent article about the topic I wanted to cover – ditching “the business”. So instead, I thought I’d provide a quick update into what’s going on and put a request out there. Working On InsideProduct …
If you regularly work with product teams in a business analyst or product owner role, I’m going to guess that you’ve struggled to figure out the proper level of detail for your requirements. It didn’t matter if you wrote epic requirements documents (which were probably too long and didn’t have the right detail) or a …
Next time you find yourself in a room of product people and agile coaches ask the question “should you have both product managers and product owners?” You’ll be sure to start a discussion with a lot of sound and fury that resolves absolutely nothing. InsideProduct is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support …
This week’s been a busy one with work and a quick workcation to Denver to see Imagine Dragons at Red Rocks Amphitheater. Great location, great band. Here’s a sampling… But it didn’t feel right to skip a week, so I thought this was a great time to share some of my recent podcast appearances. Thanks …
The first week of October, I presented a session at IBADD about backlog refinement. Before the session started, I asked the attendees to write on post it notes what they hoped to learn. That activity serves a couple of purposes. It gives me insights into how people interpreted the intent of the session, it indicates …
Prioritization, or more specifically deciding what you will and will not build, is a key decision teams and organizations make on a regular basis. You could even say that it is the most important activity that product people, including business analysts, do. Yet many organizations use ineffective approaches to prioritization that adds more confusion than …
I originally wrote this article for Project Connections, one of my first outlets for article writing that sadly is no longer around. Fortunately, I was able to get all of my pieces back from the site and am able to freshen up my favorites for republishing. Enjoy! There are a few activities surrounding project work …
On June 30,2020 I recorded a webinar with Adrian Reed for Blackmetric Business Solutions. It was a wide ranging discussion driven by questions from the audience around all things business analysis and agile. Here are my responses to the questions asked during that session.
If you’re familiar with retrospectives you probably think of them as a way for your team to pause, reflect on how the last couple of weeks went and make adjustments to your team’s ways of working. That’s usually how I think of them also. Then this week I had the chance to experience a new …
Recently a connection on LinkedIn asked me an interesting question: After working as a Business Analyst and Project Manager for several years, I’ve discovered that many of my previous tasks actually fit the Product Owner role perfectly. So yesterday I applied for a Product Owner role. I’m hoping you can provide a pros/cons overview to …
For the last few weeks, I’ve explored what prioritization looks like in a variety of different scenarios. This week finished up that series with a look at how you can go about prioritizing a bunch of stakeholder requests. This is a common scenario when you’ve already built software for your company (ie internal product) and …
As I describe prioritization approaches in different scenarios, I thought I’d share an example from my past – revising the search functionality on agilealliance.org. I wrote this when I was on staff at Agile Alliance, so there’s a chance it’s changed since I wrote this, but the approach is still valid. You can also read …
Last week, we talked about how to prioritize your new product development efforts when you’re trying to get to product market fit. Once you hit that sought after milestone, your product moves into the growth stage of the product life cycle and you switch into product optimization. So it makes sense that optimization is the …
Here’s the next in a series of issues on prioritization. This week’s issue looks at prioritization when you build a new product. Some people refer to this as going from 0 → 1. In the world of internal products, you can think of this as what you need to do to enable a brand new …
