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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Learning is crucial for us product people. As our products change and eventually mature, we must change the way we manage them. As our jobs change, and we have to grow into them and acquire new skills. Additionally, product management is a comparatively young profession that is still evolving; new models and techniques emerge. This article discusses how embracing a growth mindset helps you succeed as a product professional.
