Agile Product Development

As product managers, our job is to determine what matters most to our customers. At any given time, there could be 100 really great ideas that need implementing, but realistically we can only complete two or three per month. We have to ask ourselves: which three do we build? How deep do we go? And Read more »

There are lots of different frameworks for how to run projects so they are ‘agile’. Tim Beattie takes us through some principles that will help you no matter which specific ways of working you choose to implement. Don’t Make Assumptions of Simplicity When working through a Discovery phase, you’ll be doing activities such as empathy Read more »

Often our role as Product Managers is to be a translator between the business and delivery teams. Here Morag McLaren looks at a few things she’s learned through this process when it comes to Agile. Don’t Forget the Other Parts of the Agile Manifesto Most people’s perception of the agile manifesto is that it tells Read more »

The internet lends itself to binary positions: you’re either for something or against it, advocating it or decrying it. It’s not just Twitter’s 280 characters that limit us to this black and white thinking, most blog posts and conference talks seem to follow the same trend. And I’m not even talking about politics. Waterfall vs Read more »

Lateral leadership describes the art of efficiently influencing others around you without formal authority. It is essential for succeeding in the implicit leadership position that product managers find themselves in. In this talk from this year’s MTP Engage in Hamburg, I share some advice on how product people can use lateral leadership in managing agile Read more »

Having worked on teams using agile methodologies for several years, retrospectives are a major part of my life as a product manager.  Retrospectives (retros) are held at the end of each sprint cycle, at the end of the overall release, and sometimes to review other meetings or processes. Retros are intended to review your team’s Read more »

Bashing agile is in vogue at the moment, so when veteran product manager and product design evangelist Jeff Patton suggested it as a topic for his keynote talk at MTP Engage I jumped at it. If the audience was expecting a speech which shot down agile methodologies, they were wrong. Instead Jeff started to deconstruct agile Read more »

Building an MVP and launching a product is actually the easy part. It’s much more difficult to manage a product in its maturity or decline stages, so I wanted to tackle the challenges of a product that’s past its initial growth stage, and share some tips on: – How to avoid becoming a feature factory, Read more »

Summary: In order to drive lasting and sustainable change, you need to be curious about the people you’re working with and explore their perspectives. This helps you to collaborate with all parts of the organisation no matter what their attitude to change may be. Finally, you’ve got to be lean, delivering quick wins that you Read more »

#MusicMonday at ProductTank Oslo saw co-founder Inge André Sandvik take center stage to talk about one of his entrepreneurial adventures. Inge has had a long and varied professional background (including Telenor and Opera Software) before spearheading Soundrop as a CEO and co-founder. Inge relates how the idea behind Soundrop came to be, the early building blocks of success, and the Read more »