How Much Should I Understand? A friend, who’s recently become a product manager, asked me that recently. She’d inherited a technical product where the engineers already had a view of the direction and deliverables required. Even though it had been broken into phases, each phase was large in scope and involved a number of unconscious […]
When you first start building a product you have a lot of decisions to make. You have to figure out what to build, what to build first, and know how to explain your decisions to both yourself and your team. As the ball starts rolling, keeping track of what to deliver and when as well […]
It’s that time of year again – No, I don’t mean financial planning or strategy reviews – I mean it’s a chance to reflect on what we’ve achieved, how we’ve achieved it, and think about whether we’re being the best product person we can be. As the craft of product management evolves, and we learn […]
Understanding your product and portfolio strategy is not just a question of features, but also of customer segmentation and staying focused. Rich Mironov talks to ProductTank San Francisco about some of the most common reasons software companies fail, and the secret is that it’s nothing to do with engineering. It’s building the wrong thing, or being unable […]
Warren Buffett, a slightly successful investor, once said, “The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say ‘no’ to almost everything.” Swap person for company and qualify company with technology startup, and not only is it an informed statement, it’s an absolute fact. At the start of the year, […]
No matter how you prioritise your backlog, it’s always a challenge to deal with technical debt. Martin Fowler has a pretty good explanation of what technical debt is, and the obvious risks it brings: Doing things the quick and dirty way sets us up with a technical debt, which is similar to a financial debt. […]
Michelle You has been a part of the ProductTank community since 2010 and she joined us again for ProductTank June, which was all about on Prioritisation, Roadmapping, and Portfolio Management. As Co-Founder and CPO of Songkick she has plenty of experience navigating improvements and changes to products. Effective prioritisation is one of the toughest challenges that most product […]
I talk to a shocking number of Product Managers on a regular basis who are exasperated at their company’s approach to roadmapping. Some companies refuse outright to have a roadmap, instead opting to put to paper only what they can commit to in the next few sprints – ie. a release plan or project plan. […]
I was first introduced to the Kano model in a talk by the brilliant Jared Spool, and it immediately struck a chord with me. Here is a beautifully simple model to distinguish between basic and differentiating features. The model was developed by Noriaka Kano in the 1970s and 1980s while studying quality control and customer […]
