Tag Archives: stakeholders

Getting Stakeholder Engagement Right

| November 17, 2015

Being a successful product manager or product owner requires more than building a product with the right user experience (UX) and features. If the stakeholders don’t support your product, then it will be difficult to achieve success. It is therefore important to engage the right stakeholders and to work with them in the right way. This post discusses a proven technique to analyse stakeholders, the power-interest grid, and it shares my recommendations for engaging with different stakeholder groups in the right way.

3 Common Product Roadmapping Mistakes

| August 19, 2015

The product roadmap is a great tool to describe the likely growth of a product. But there are three common mistakes I see people make: View the roadmap as a guarantee; show epics and user stories on the roadmap; and speculate about the likely development of the product. This post discusses the three product roadmapping mistakes to help you avoid and rectify them.

The Product Roadmap and the Product Backlog

| September 9, 2014

The product backlog is a great tool to capture ideas and requirements. But it is less suited to describe how the product is likely to develop in the longer term. This is where the product roadmap comes in. But how do the product backlog and the product roadmap relate? Is the backlog derived from the roadmap or is it the other way round? Should the product owner be responsible for both artefacts? Read on to find out my recommendations.

The Product Owner’s Guide to the Sprint Retrospective

| June 17, 2014

The sprint retrospective is a key mechanism in Scrum to improve the way people work. This article shares my tips on how you can use the meeting as the person in charge of the product to strengthen connections and improve the work.

The Picasso Product Owner: Balancing Users, Team, and Stakeholders

| September 23, 2013

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.

Get Your Focus Right: Learning and Execution in Scrum

| June 5, 2013

Learning what a product should look like and do, and building solid, shippable software are different concerns. Separating the two aspects and distinguishing between learning and execution helps you manage the stakeholder expectations, select the right research and validation techniques, and choose the right sprint goals.

Tips for an Effective Product Demo

| February 28, 2013

The sprint demo is a standard technique in Scrum to collect feedback from users, customers, and stakeholders in order to maximise the chances of developing a successful product. Sadly, not all product demosI have attended were effective. This article provides ten practical tips to fully leverage product demo, collect helpful user feedback, and make the right product decisions.

Product Owner Empowerment

| January 10, 2013

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.

Creating Effective Sprint Goals

| December 11, 2012

Working with a sprint goal is a powerful agile practice. This post helps you understand what sprint goals are, why they matter, hand you can write and track them.

Epics and Ready Stories

| November 7, 2012

This post explains how to write user stories at the right level of detail, and how to derive small, ready stories from big, coarse-grained epics.