Tag Archives: validation

Tips for Effective Product Strategy Reviews

| December 3, 2019

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.

Product Strategizing Tips

| January 9, 2018

Product strategizing refers to the activities required to determine if and why a product should be developed. Carrying out this work makes it more likely to create a product that users want and need. In this article, I share my recommendations to help you improve your product strategy work.

Leveraging Failure in Product Management

| December 4, 2017

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.

Sprint Review Tips for Product Owners

| November 15, 2017

The sprint review meeting is maybe the most important Scrum event for product people—it helps you collect feedback and make the right product decisions thereby increasing the chances of creating a successful product. But I find that product owners are not always clear on who should attend the meeting, how it should be run, and how to collect the relevant feedback. This article answers these questions and shares my tips for getting the most out of the sprint review.

10 Tips for Creating an Agile Product Roadmap

| July 20, 2016

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.

How Minimum Viable Products & Features Helped Me Write “Strategize”

| May 10, 2016

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.

10 Tips for Creating a Product Strategy with the Product Vision Board

| July 16, 2014

This post does what its title says: It shares my recommendations for creating an agile product strategy using the Vision Board. It addresses readers who want to find out more about using a product strategy in an agile, dynamic environment and readers who want to get better at using the Vision Board.

How to Choose the Right Product Validation Technique in Scrum

| April 23, 2014

Scrum employs the product demo as its default technique to understand if the right product with the right features is developed. While a product demo can be very effective, it can also be limiting. Like any research and validation technique, demoes have their strengths and weaknesses. This article provides an overview of alternative validation methods so you can choose the one that is best suited for your product.

A Template for Formulating Great Sprint Goals

| March 11, 2014

Sprint goals can guide the work of the development team and describe the desired outcome of a sprint. As useful as they are, sprint goals are not always correctly applied: They often reiterate the user stories to be implemented rather than the reason for running the sprint. This article introduces my sprint goal template and it explains how you can apply it to take full advantage of sprint goals .

Combining Lean Startup and Scrum

| June 27, 2013

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.