Product, Projekt & Agile: Thoughts and articles that touch and cover Product and Project Management, for the majority with Agile Methodologies. These items include Market Observation, Competitive Analysis, Backlog Prioritisation, but also choice of tools and technology.
Product Owner vs. Product Manager: Product Management is a challenging role and requires diverse skills. Large organisation often introduce a split between two similar, close roles – Product Ownership and Product Management. Both requires a large set of skills.
Jordan Bergtraum, The Product Mentor, a mentor at The Product Guy, leads a conversation on this split.
Source: The Product Guy.
As a concept, the North Star principle gained a lot of attention in Product Management recently. Amplitude, a vendor of analytics tools, has a guideline to this concept. Their playbook walks product managers, those that want to enter the domain or even those just curious about methods and principles through the ideas. But also sets the scenes for potential applications by walking through exemplary goals to achieve with this approach.
The playbook comes in 7 chapters, starting by describing the ideas to apply with the North Star concept. Only after the introduction the playbook enters the practical application of the concept, and with a chapter on product metric checklist checklists, it emphasises the importance of metrics. With this it also stresses the importance of selecting the right metric and not to lose a product in vain. E.g. active users would be the wrong metric, given the goal that shall be achieved.
More practical guidelines come with the chapter on running workshops in part 3, and the chapter on defining the right guiding metrics. In between, the document also gives success stories: there are sections that talk through a successful implementation of North Star at Netflix. But also Amplitude is leveraging the methodology and shares their experience in a section.
The closing chapters dedicate to debugging the processes attached, implementing them and over time changing directions.
In all the recent hype around the method, the key take away is to simplify ideas for your organisation. The approach is supposed to make it easy for your teams to understand the direction the product is taking. And even more following this direction. For a product management, communicating ideas should be a core skill. This approach gives great tools in doing so.
The guide to discovering your product’s North Star to improve the way you manage and build products.
from the Amplitude Playbook
Source: Amplitude – The North Star Playbook
Wie mehrere Quellen heute berichtet haben, ist der erst neuerlich verfügbare Mac Pro in der höchsten Ausbaustufe teurer als ein Tesla Model 3 in der “Performance” Ausbaustufe. Apple ist nicht dafür bekannt, billige Hardware zu produzieren, aber 62.568,00 € sind selbst für die bekannten Verhältnisse beeindruckend.
Man bekommt dann für den Preis immerhin:
allerdings keinen Monitor. Aber dafür wird eine 8TB SSD später noch verfügbar gemacht werden.
Python, the programming language, gained lot’s of popularity only in the past decade. In particular for big data applications, machine learning and data science the language is almost without alternative. But also for tool development or web applications backends, Python has huge adoption. Reasons are it’s huge ecosystem and a friendly, constructive community. Despite it’s newer competitors it has been around for 30 years. One of the most appreciated benefits is the steep learning curve, that allows virtually everyone to understand Python code.
Dropbox has an interview with Guido van Rossum, who published the first version of the language in 1989. The conversation revolves around the purpose of code and how python helps improve cooperation and productivity.
“You primarily write your code to communicate with other coders, and, to a lesser extent, to impose your will on the computer.”
Guido van Rossum
A conversation with the creator of the world’s most popular programming language on removing brain friction for better work. Source: The Mind at Work: Guido van Rossum on how Python makes thinking in code easier
Part of the compelling nature of SaaS Products is the possibility to understand the user and improve on the go. Any Product Manager will literally have to understand what are the use-cases for customers and how to focus on the important areas. Just recently our team led the debate which metrics would be the right ones to focus on.
Nancy Wang, Head of Product Management at Amazon Web Services, highlights six product metrics enterprise SaaS companies should track.
In this Article, Nancy Wang, head of Product Management at the most successful cloud service providers, shares her insights on important metrics to keep an eye on. The possibility to understand often goes overboard and requires focus.
The case under discussion in the article revolves around paid products. Derived metrics are a foundation that serves as a blueprint to other products in the SaaS space. Goals differ, but ultimately, to make a product successful, it requires an understanding of how successful customers were, using the product. Following the established funnel pattern, users are being segmented into funnel. Along that funnel, the metrics acquired need to reflect the stage of the journey the user is on.
At the top of the funnel, most often the interaction is anonymous and requires profiling to understand the audience coming in. Further down in the funnel, metrics capture engagement and transaction. Towards the end of the funnel, the metric needs to relate to retention.
Source: Do You Measure Up? Metrics for Enterprise SaaS Product Managers
All too often, two departments are burried in deep arguments for most of their days. While business, the outbound oriented Product Management department, leads customer conversations and verifies business requirements, engineering is pushing towards a better product.
Their goals are not always aligned despite the necessity to build a product together. Overcoming controversial goals can be difficult, yet frustrating to Product Managers in their quest to build better products.
Itamar Gilad shares a few thoughts how to overcome this gap.
Managers and product managers are often frustrated by the apparent lack of care the development team is showing for the needs of the…
When Python3 came out in 2009, it was already heavily debated. Python3 would be incompatible with previous versions of the popular language, but fix many drawbacks. While the vision was clear and the community initially planned to move forward much quicker. The demand for having a 2.x branch was so huge, however, that the community decided to extend support for 2.7 until the end of 2019. Stack Overflow took a look on why the path took so long.
Only after the Google SVP let the public know ‘He’d let guests know about smart speakers‘, there is more bad news on these smart home devices. Researchers found approved apps that deliberately turn these devices to spy on their owner.
Amazon- and Google-approved apps turned both voice-controlled devices into “smart spies.”
Source: Alexa and Google Home abused to eavesdrop and phish passwords
According to Anthony Murphy, it’s the road to failure. And I couldn’t agree more, despite the framing. My personal experience showed things in the end always find a way. However, the separation between Responsibility and Accountability leads to lots of friction, debates and, in case somebody with accountability has to be identified, finger-pointing.
First of all, the article is entirely right, responsibility is not something that is assigned, it is something individual contributors take. Colleagues, that lead the way and take responsibility for their decisions. Those that make sure task are picked up and delivered.
And then there is accountability. Something that that can only be assumed for something that already happened before. All too often, there are much more candidates to volunteer for accountability, because it is misunderstood for leadership (or a management position), alongside with the willingness to spend days and weeks in non-customer value creating, internal debates how RACI Matrices (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) Matrices need to be defined and filled.
Only when responsibilities from the same matrix fail to deliver, accountability is a perfect model to seek problems with other actors in the matrix, preferably those responsible.
To put customer goals in first place, the agile manifesto has a simple answer and puts the team in charge.
via Product Coalition.
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