Product Planning

Some years ago, I wrote a blog post noting that small teams are more creative and productive than big teams. I suggested that this might be because, like a band, they were self organising, communicated easily and informally and had autonomy over what they played. Band vs Orchestra I contrasted this to an orchestra, which Read more »

For me, as it also is for many product people, the idea of applying a scientific approach to product management came from Eric Ries in Lean Startup – put simply, his approach outlines the way companies can successfully build and launch new products by learning what their customers really want and by testing continuously. In Read more »

David Kullman talks to ProductTank NYC about why most projects are doomed to fail right from the very start. David is a Partner and Development Manager at CitrusByte, working with both large corporations and startups to develop innovative software solutions to challenges they may be facing. IT Project Failures – The Statistics In 1995, IT Read more »

Or Three Ways Product Owners can Stay on top of Scrum 2016 was a big year for the Justinmind product development team. We shipped a new feature every month or so, tackled bug fixes and upgraded the usability of our software (an interactive prototyping tool). With hindsight it was exciting, but such intense activity presents Read more »

We’ve all been there: two months into a two-week project and the end still isn’t anywhere in sight. Sometimes a good project goes bad, you learn your lesson, and move on. But sometimes the issue is deeper than that, and it’s not a one-off fluke, but an institutional issue that keeps repeating itself. It’s so Read more »

Christian Rudder, co-founder of dating site OkCupid, has learned a lot about online dating behaviour. As a data scientist, he’s also been in the unique position of being able to observe how people behave in the dating world when no one is watching them. The insights in his book Dataclysm are fascinating, the one that Read more »

As a product manager it’s not uncommon to feel pulled in a million different directions as you work to meet the needs of your customers, developers and company stakeholders. While there are a large number of tools which claim to help you to create value, for me, quite frankly, it boils down to only a few secret weapons Read more »

I’m a product manager for a content management system that runs some of the most-visited websites in the world. Our team reports to the CTO, and we sit within the engineering arm of the organization. Prior to this I’d had a year’s product experience at a customer-facing SaaS company and naively I believed I could copy-paste Read more »

Technical and product teams can spend a lot of time estimating the effort involved in a proposed piece of work. But how many of us even bother to write a value on a piece of work? Over time I’ve become fed up with seeing product people managing story backlogs where, at most, they had an effort Read more »

My product is store stock management. I product-manage multiple apps which allow store workers at retail giant Tesco to manage stock and provide an excellent customer service. Tesco store apps include all the stock control routines: deliveries, reductions, counts, waste, training, product search and so on. I was surprised to learn (less so when I Read more »