Product Management Process

Agile methodologies extol the virtues of releasing early and using feedback to guide your product decisions. For new products, this philosophy works well and can avoid wasting effort building features that users don’t value. However, agile techniques often hit problems when used on established products due to stakeholder fears about brand and experience damage. The […] Read more »

 An interesting philosophical discussion was triggered on MindTheProduct’s Product Managers Skype chat when I questioned why someone had incomplete user stories in their development backlog. The majority of the answers can be boiled down to “because that is how it is done”. However, I feel there is another way, which offers several advantages over doing the grooming […] Read more »

Tom Loosemore is the Deputy Director at the UK’s Government Digital Services and was responsible for the recent launch of a single domain, user centred government website – gov.uk. In his talk at our product management conference Mind the Product 2012 he discussed the genesis of that project and how he and his team managed […] Read more »

Charles Adler is the Co-Founder and Creative Director of Kickstarter. He is an entrepreneur with over 14 years experience in interaction design. Formerly director of strategy and senior information architect at Agency.com, his work in user experience, design, and information architecture is driven by a commitment to all things clean and simple. Previously, he cofounded […] Read more »

One day, a colleague and I were having a conversation over a pint as to whether you could make the film Blade Runner using Agile processes. We concluded that you could not. We thought you’d need something more. A vision. A way of developing that vision, and a way to not lose the vision in […] Read more »

Tom Chi is the Experience Lead for Special Projects at Google X, their in-house skunk labs that has brought us amazing products from augmented reality glasses in Project Glass to self driving cars. Tom has a rich background, having worked as a Designer, Product Manager, Developer, and Consultant, and at Mind the Product 2012 he […] Read more »

In How to make products that people love, Marty Cagan had tons of good advice for rapid product discovery, including the importance of finding the fastest, cheapest way to validate ideas. Chief among this toolkit is the rough live data prototype. For teams working primarily with digital products, this type of rapid prototyping in software […] Read more »

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” – Alan Kay Every so often, I hear someone suggest that you can’t really build a roadmap when you’re working in Agile, because you’re only planning one iteration at a time. That, my friends, is nonsense. In this article I’ll describe a lightweight planning […] Read more »

One of the core responsibilities of a product manager is to prioritise everything that needs to get done into a roadmap. There are different views on how that roadmap should look but first, what about the prioritisation process itself? Prioritise for scale Whatever process you follow it’s important that it’s appropriate to your business and […] Read more »

The public discourse around startups, product management and UX has become a touch dogmatic for my taste lately. If you’re not following the Lean Startup(TM) to the letter, holding daily scrums, doing continuous integration, embracing failure or (pick your own buzzword) you’re apparently doing something wrong. But I think this sort of dogmatic thinking is […] Read more »