Innovation and failure go hand in hand. It’s impossible to bring new products and features to life without taking informed risks and making mistakes. But effectively leveraging failure can be challenging on a personal and organisational level: As individuals and companies, we want to succeed, not fail. This article shares my recommendations on how to fail well and learn from it.
The sprint review is maybe the most important Scrum meeting for product people. Applied correctly, it increases the chances of creating a successful product. But I find that the meeting is not always used effectively. My article addresses this issue and shares practical tips for getting the most out of the sprint review.
Being able to empathise with the users and understand their feelings and thoughts is key to offer a successful product. This article shares five tips to help you develop empathy for your users and create a deeper understanding of their needs.
A minimum viable product (MVP) is often mistaken as the first general release of a product, the initial offering that is good enough to address the early market. But for most products, an MVP should be a much earlier and cruder version that acts as a learning device—a means to test a crucial assumption and make the right product decision. This post shows how I used MVPs and MVFs—minimum viable features—to write my latest book, Strategize.
User stories are a powerful technique to capture the product functionality from the perspective of a user or customer. But how do we discover the right stories? When should they be written and how detailed should they be? Read this post to find out my answers to these questions.
The GO product roadmap is a goal-oriented product planning tool designed to work with Lean Startup and Scrum. By focusing on goals, the roadmap shifts the conversation from debating features to establishing shared outcomes. This post explains how you can apply the GO product roadmap–from deriving it from the product strategy to keeping it updated.
Personas are a powerful technique to describe the users and customers of a product in order to make the right product decisions. This post shares my tips to create helpful personas for digital products.
The minimum viable product (MVP) and the minimal marketable product (MMP) are two powerful concepts: The MVP helps you test your ideas. The MMP enables you to launch your product faster. This post discusses both concepts together with their relationship.
Can Lean Startup and Scrum be combined? And if so, how do they fit together? This post shares my answers for blending the two models, and it maps out a high-level process for product discovery and product development.
“This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes,” says Morpheus to Neo in the movie “The Matrix”. This quote reminds me of the choice we face when dealing with a new product idea: Should we walk away from it, or should we implement it? To help you decide if and how to progress an idea, I have developed the Product Vision Board. In this post, I show how the board can be applied to kick-start the product discovery process and to create a new digital product.