Working as a product owner is fun and challenging at times. One challenge is to balance two separate concerns: the market with the users and their needs, and the company – the team developing the product as well as the internal stakeholders. If one aspect is neglected, the product success is in danger.
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.
Playing the product owner role can be challenging: It requires the authority to say no to ideas, request, and feedback in order to achieve product success, as I explain in this article.
“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.
Scrum is a simple framework based on the idea of inspect and adapt: Create a product increment, show it to the stakeholders, and use the feedback to see if the right product is developed. This post describes what I regard as the essence of Scrum: a cyclic three-step process. It shows how the three steps help create a product with the right features and the right user experience (UX).
Employing experiments is a powerful technique to facilitate the creation of new products and new features. But to experiment effectively, we need to be clear where innovation takes place and uncertainty resides. Is it the user experience, the business model, or the technologies? Without the right understanding, it’s difficult to ask leap-of-faith questions, formulate meaningful hypotheses, and carry out helpful experiments. This blog posts introduces a simple model that helps you effectively innovate.
This post introduces my Product Canvas, a simple but powerful tool that helps you create a product with a great user experience and the right features. It combines agile development and user-experience design by complementing user stories with personas, storyboards, scenarios, design sketches and other UX artefacts. Read on to find out more.
This blog post discusses what an agile product roadmap is. It covers the information such a roadmap should contain, the benefits it provides, when it makes sense to employ a roadmap, how the product roadmap and the product backlog relate, and who should own the product roadmap.
Refining the product backlog helps you make the right product decisions and get the product backlog ready for the next sprint. In this post, I show how you successfully refine your product backlog in five steps.
Getting lost in the product details and struggling to decide if a feature should be implemented is a common challenge for product owners. This post helps you focus on what really counts: creating value for the people using the product and the organisation developing it.