As product managers and product owners, we make a myriad of decisions—from shaping the product strategy and determining the product roadmap to deciding the detailed functionality of our products. But do we make all these decisions effectively? And do we always secure the necessary buy-in? This post helps you make better decisions. It discusses five common decision rules and explains when to apply them.
A product roadmap is a powerful tool to describe how a product is likely to grow, to align the stakeholders, and to acquire a budget for developing the product. But creating an effective roadmap is not easy, particularly in an agile context where changes occur frequently and unexpectedly. This post shares ten practical tips to helps you create an actionable agile product roadmap.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.