Tag Archives: innovation

Common Product Vision Board Mistakes

| August 11, 2020

The product vision board is a simple yet powerful tool to capture the product vision and the product strategy. Despite its simplicity, effectively using it can be challenging. I have seen many boards over the years that suffered from a number of shortcomings including a poorly defined target group, an unconvincing value proposition, and business goals that weren’t measurable. This article helps you recognise and rectify common product vision board mistakes, thereby maximising the chances of creating an inspiring vision and a winning product strategy.

Are Feature Teams or Component Teams Right for Your Product?

| July 7, 2020

Whenever you require more than a single development team to progress your product, you have choice: You can organise the teams around features or components. This article explains why this decision matters for product people, and it shares my advice on when feature teams are right for your product and when component teams are better suited.

Leveraging Software Platforms

| February 11, 2020

Software platforms can be powerful tools to grow a product portfolio and create new revenue streams. But successfully using them can be tricky. This article shares my tips to help you take advantage of your platform.

Tips for Effective Product Strategy Reviews

| December 3, 2019

The product strategy describes how you plan to achieve product success. It typically covers the product’s value proposition, market, stand-out features, and business goals. While a strategy is key to creating a winning product, it would be a mistake to blindly execute it and assume it will always stay valid. As your product develops and grows, and as the market and the technologies evolve, the product strategy has to change, too. You should therefore regularly review and adjust it. The following tips will help you with this.

Collocation, Trust, and Distributed Teams

| November 12, 2019

Working with distributed or dispersed teams is a common experience for many product people in an increasingly globalised world. While we have powerful collaboration tools at our disposal that make it possible to work across sites, countries, and continents, being separated is not always beneficial: It can damage the chances of reaching product success, as I explain in this article.

A Strategy Map

| March 4, 2019

Without an effective strategy, it’s hard to achieve product success. But what does strategy entail? And which tools are best suited for making strategic decisions? This article offers my answers and introduces a strategy map–a guide to the strategic decisions required to make and keep products successful.

Tips for Rewriting a Digital Product

| January 8, 2019

Rewriting an existing product is often a cost and technology-centric exercise that can feel like a joyless necessity. But instead of replacing like-for-like and providing a carbon-copy of the old product, you should see the rewriting effort as an opportunity to innovate, to create more value for the users and the business, as I explain in this article.

Technical Debt and Product Success

| December 4, 2018

Similar to a company experiencing financial debt, products can incur “technical debt”: This happens when wrong or suboptimal architecture, technology, and coding decisions are taken. Consequently, the architecture may not be as loosely coupled as it should be, and the code may be messy rather than clean. This article explains why product people should care about technical debt and it offers strategies for addressing it.

Establishing an Effective Product Strategy Process

| October 2, 2018

Developing a successful product is not down to luck or trying hard enough. Instead, product success starts with making the right strategic decisions. But as product people, we are often so preoccupied with the tactics—be it dealing with an urgent support request or writing new user stories—that we sometimes no longer see the wood for the trees. In the worst case, we neglect the strategic work and end up with an unsuccessful product. To avoid this pitfall, you should establish an effective product strategy process, as I discuss in this article.

Strategic Options for Mature Products

| August 14, 2018

Product strategy does not only matter for new and young products; it is equally important for older ones. This article discusses two main choices for mature products: extending the life cycle and revitalising the product, or leveraging maturity and turning the product into a cash cow.