Many companies want to be innovative. They launch innovation programs, hackathons, and more. Then they go out and manage as if their company was an assembly line. They create standardized processes, controls and approvals, hierarchies and reporting structures, meetings about meetings. All of these to refine a process leading in the wrong direction. How can …
I was rereading Marty Cagan’s book Inspired and I came across this quote: “Good teams celebrate when they achieve a significant impact to the business results. Bad teams celebrate when they finally released something.” Marty Cagan, Inspired It’s a good reminder that as a leader we need to pay attention to what we celebrate. Launching …
I attended a talk several years ago by the CEO of a very successful software company, and afterward a current customer asked about a product enhancement. Most CEO’s would respond with something like, “It’s on our roadmap” or “That’s good feedback, we’ll take it under consideration.” Not this CEO! His response, “Our product is not …
I’m in the process of selling my car, and making a 20-year old truck my dad gave me my primary vehicle. The car was paid off, reliable, comfortable, and I really enjoyed driving it. So why get rid of it? Because I realized I didn’t want to invest my money in it any longer. I’m …
Shouldn’t we always listen to our customers if we want to create great products? Yes and no. Blindly following the maxim that good managers should keep close to their customers can sometimes be a fatal mistake. Clayton Christensen – The Innovator’s Dilemma Clayton Christensen goes on to outline the dilemma we face as product managers. …
As a product leader, we should never let our teams think success is just delivering a feature, because our product teams don’t exist to deliver features. We exist to deliver business value by solving customer problems. Any time we learn how to solve a valuable customer problem and we launch that, we have succeed.
What do you believe is true about your product that you’re actively trying to prove right now? Maybe it’s a new feature, a new subset of features, or even a whole new product, but you need to identify a hypothesis. The power in calling it a hypothesis, is that it declares to everyone around you …
Rework or change requests are the enemy to a project manager. But to the Agile Product Manager, they’re the result of learning. I don’t believe we are truly Agile if we only plan to build and release each feature once. To me that’s gambling. To be Agile, we must admit that we need to learn …
What would it look like to cannibalize your own business, your own product? Clayton Christensen said it well when he wrote – “The fear of cannibalizing sales of existing products is often cited as a reason why established firms delay the introduction of new technologies.” If we fail to disrupt ourselves, then we will allow …
As we transition from a Waterfall to an Agile approach to planning and product management, there is fear that there will be no plan, no organization, and long term vision. In the book, A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander captures well though how we can use patterns, starting small and growing bigger to create a town …
