Category: Product, Projekt & Agile

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.

  • 7 Powerful Talks To Make You a Better Product Manager

    Should you be working in Product Management, this may well be a good selection for Sunday evening to watch:

    TED Talks for Product Managers
    TED

    As a product manager, you’ll want to continuously be seeking out new ways to learn, new information, fresh ideas, and inspiration. It’s a constant learning process, and it’s important to stay open and stay motivated. While there are many resources out there, including books, blogs, podcasts, influential people on social media, and tons of online publications, there is something we love about TED Talks.

    1.) How great leaders inspire action, by Simon Sinek

    2.) Chris Hadfield: What I learned from going blind in space

    3.) Sheena Iyengar: The Art of Choosing

    4.) Margaret Gould Stewart: How giant websites design for you (and a billion others, too)

    5.) Guy Kawsaki: The art of innovation

    6. Seth Godin: How to get your ideas to spread

    7. Navi Radjou: Creative problem-solving in the face of extreme limits

    Source: 7 Powerful TED Talks To Make You a Better PM

  • Culture and Organizational Change

    Culture and Organizational Change

    Just a small observation I made during AWS Transformation Day. While the entire theme for the event was on transforming business, the schedule had one track for “Culture and Organizational Change” alone. While Culture and Organizational Change is a broad and huge topic, but it is necessary and makes the difference for agility in rapidly changing and competitive markets. Amazon has been talking about this for years and they share their knowledge with their partners.

    On an attempt to find out how organizations actually master this, the perspective most consultants and companies I talked to during the event shared with me was rather sobering. Anyone exhibiting at that event merely offered to run any software project under an agile management. No support, consultancy or even efforts to drive actual change, whatsoever, at least nothing that would exceed a traditional software project scope.

    Cultural and Organizational Change is something requiring executive buy in and is killed quickly by means of exhaustive efforts to plan ahead. Culture needs to embrace the possibility to change quickly, throughout the process. And the wish for management is human, to have transparency and perspective early in the process, it is just as natural in the process for developers to stay vague for items that are not yet clear.

    Any cultural change needs to embrace bi-directual communication and the ability to break down complex. On first thought this sounds easy, but requires plenty of cooperation and trust in a clearly defined team. Culture is rooted in clear understanding of roles, responsibilities and not to mention last, trust of all members.

  • Prioritize Opportunities, Not Solutions

    Prioritize Opportunities, Not Solutions

    I cringe every time I see product teams use a spreadsheet to rank the ideas in their backlog based on some made-up math formula usually consisting of things like business value, user value, and technical difficulty. While this exercise is pervasive, it misses the point entirely. Our job is not to prioritize solutions. A product […]

    Source: Prioritize Opportunities, Not Solutions | Product Talk

  • Empowering the Product Team

    Point Towards the Mountain

    Set Rules for the Journey

    Focus on Learning and Teaching

    Empowerment is Worth it

    Source: 4 Keys to Empowering Your Product Team – Mind the Product

  • Product Management vs Product Ownership

    The organisation that I am part of introduced an overlaying Product Management department only fairly recently, less than a year ago. Early in the time it was exciting to see this role dedicated to market and customer perspective, but it raised questions over how this was different from Product Ownership from day one.

    Over the course of the past year many discussions have been led and lot’s of articles have been led. This week Anthony Murphy shared his perspective and experiences on the Product Coalition. While my own experiences with this separated role have been predominantly positive, I tend to see the necessity to split responsibilities for larger organisations. The article is reflecting on why the Agile movement created the Product Owner in the way it did and how it was meant to abolish the Product Manager to start with.

    A story of love, hate, oppression and triumph

    Source: The Collision of Product Management and Product Ownership

  • Competitive Analysis and Strategy To Win

    A product’s success is not only defined by its features. Whether it can win in the market to a large extent is owed to the environment it is offered. Customer requirements, competitive offering, market climate, environmental conditions, total cost of ownership (TCO) can have an impact on the products success. A competitive overview is essential for any product manager and a competitive analysis can help sharpen the view.

    Product School just today let Joao Fiadeiro share the experience he gathered during his tenure at Google as a Product Manager for Youtube.

    Competitive Analysis and Strategy To Win by YouTube PM in Product School.

    Competitive Analysis
    Competitive Product Analysis

    Source: Competitive Analysis and Strategy To Win by YouTube PM – Product School

  • Pyramid of product manager needs

    Pyramid of product manager needs

    Benoit des Ligneris describes a model in his article about the environment in which product management has to navigate. This environment has many influences, and a product evolves with influences from many sources. The Maslov inspired pyramid of Product Managers needs starts with real world dependencies. The market is the basis for any product, hence is the most needed input to any product and the product management. Further in the article Benoit describes the individual layers and why they are relevant to the Product Management organisation.

    While objectively everybody will agree a Product Manager will need to mediate between these layers, it may be worthwhile to evaluate the level of influence each individual layer has in a particular organisation. Most often the influence on the product is reversed and higher levels influence outcomes more than they should.

    It’s the product management organisations responsibility to feed the product by its needs and not just represent but balance all layers in the decision management process. A lot like in the Maslov pyramid, a healthy product starts with basic needs.

    Product Management Pyramid
    Product Management Pyramid

    A useful and visual mental model that represent the product management role in relation to its environment.

    Source: The pyramid of the product manager needs (Maslow inspired)

  • IntelliCode for AI-assisted now available

    Microsoft trained an AI with Github projects that have more than 100 stars on them. The AI is supposed to help coding. And it is available now. AI is not yet there to take a programmers job, but Facebook took similar approaches to speed up development. Be afraid, coding people.

    Symbolbild (Techcrunch)

    IntelliCode, Microsoft’s tool for AI-assisted coding, is now generally available. It supports C# and XAML in Visual Studio and Java, JavaScript, TypeScript and Python in Visual Studio Code. By default, it is now also included in Visual Studio 2019, starting with the second preview of version 16.1, which the company also announced that. IntelliCode is […]

    Source: Microsoft’s IntelliCode for AI-assisted coding comes out of preview | TechCrunch

  • Tech for Managers

    First, I was excited to see a “Web Technologies for Managers” course exists.

    Then, I reminded myself how often I rant on the internet that “tech is dead” and all industries get digitized. It’s not too long ago that successful companies required their managers to have an understanding of the business they are in. That is mechanical engineers managing car manufacturers, electrical engineers managing electronics businesses. Only the digital industry seems to have technical managers and business managers.

    I periodically remind people how difficult the question “are you doing business or technology” is any tech driven. Even McDonalds has their managers flip burgers to start their engagement with the company, to give them an understanding of how the business looks like really.

    Next time you hear this question, or worse, ask this question, ask yourself: “Am I in the right business”. Likely, you are better qualified doing something else. The reasoning for this harsh thought is simple. Assuming you see yourself in the high tech business and expect your counterpart to do business with you, you need to radiate confidence about what you are doing. Asking this question high tech managers clearly transports you only know half of the story.

    Being an engineer and a business person, I haven’t taken the course itself, hence I cannot recommend it. But I can recommend any person in the business to flip burgers for a few weeks, or the digital equivalent, follow a few technical tutorials. Preferrably from the company you are working for but also, Google, AWS or Github offer plenty of free courses to get your hands dirty. And all of these are free of charge, there is no excuse not to understand technology to that extent that it adds value.

    Nevertheless, here is the link: “Web Technology for Managers“. Go learn something.

  • DIB_DETECTING_AGILE_BS_2018.10.05.PDF

    Das Pentagon hat sich vom Defense Innovation Boards ein Papier erarbeiten lassen, wie Agile BS zu erkennen ist. Die ein oder andere Frage wird dem geneigten Leser aus der Softwarebranche sicher bekannt vorkommen.

    Das Paper ist hier: DIB_DETECTING_AGILE_BS_2018.10.05.PDF