Product Planning

Sign up for our product! Tell us about yourself. Fill out your profile. Tell us where you’re going so we can bring you a driver. Let us see your bank transaction data so we can give you financial recommendations. Every time you ask your users for information, they’re going to ask why they should trust Read more »

When you’re looking for new ideas, look beyond yourself. Collaboration and teamwork is a great way to generate new ideas. A popular way to do this is to brainstorm ideas, then aggregate them. Write a thought, whatever comes into your head, put it on a Post-It note. Now, stop. Let’s put them all together on Read more »

What prompts someone to shape an idea into a commercial reality?  As a designer, I’m by nature a positive person, and as an entrepreneur I am, of necessity, always positive. So when a friend suggested I think about a mobile device for pre-schoolers (the bPhone is a mobile phone for children aged three to seven), I Read more »

One of the first things that I think about when launching a new product or service is how do we get people to notice? How do we get people to come? Just because you offer something wonderful and that you are passionate about does not mean you will instantly attract customers. Building a marketing message Read more »

One month ago I subscribed to Digit, a service that promises a way to “save money without thinking about it”. The way it works is simple – you submit your mobile number, link your bank account and you’re pretty much set. There are no apps, no user interfaces or additional confirmations. The only thing Digit Read more »

You’ve got sprint planning coming up and, looking at your backlog, you see that there is nothing ready for the team to work on. I have talked to quite a few product people about this and no matter how experienced they were, all of them told me that this is a situation they’ve encountered at Read more »

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. Read more »

As product managers and entrepreneurs, we know the importance of validating an idea before committing to getting it built. However, validation is easier said than done. In fact, it’s possibly one of the hardest things you will ever do in your product life cycle, otherwise products and startups wouldn’t have the abysmal 90%+ failure rate Read more »

I’ve worked as a product manager since 2005. My first role was part of the core product team at BSkyB in strategic product development.  We were product owners of the concept through to delivery to market of all the new set-top boxes and in-home consumer devices such as routers and wireless bridges, as well as Read more »

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 »