Face to Face With the Customer. You can send out as many surveys or do as many focus groups as you want, but you’ll never understand the aggravation your user community is feeling until you’re sitting next to them while they struggle to use your software. Sit with them. Don’t…
Let’s start off with what a Minimally Viable Product (MVP) is not – it’s not the least amount of stuff that can be done in a sprint. What it is intended to be is a learning tool, you’re supposed to be validating your hypothesis (or hypotheses) with an MVP. If…
There are at least two forces in product management: Agents of Chaos and Agents of the Epiphany. Agents of Chaos state emphatically what needs to be built for customers, without ever speaking to a customer. Agents of the Epiphany don’t know exactly what needs to be built but routinely watch…
When working with a new team or facing a new problem, I never say how it needs to be done. Rather, I form one question that the team needs to focus on. Answering this question helps the team keep focus on what’s truly important. For example, working with a development…
Because they really mean the same thing. As a Product Owner we’re supposed to surprise our users when we can. When we cant surprise them, at least we shouldn’t bore them. When I’m getting feedback from the team or from the user community, if they’re about to say “it’s ok”…
I was fortunate to listen first-hand to Steve Blank explain, in no uncertain terms, that if he ever found his Marketing team in the office again, he’d fire them. Because the answers aren’t in the office, they’re “out there”. So go “out there” and find the answers. So many times…
In one of the recent podcasts I listen to the statement was made “…people just don’t know how to think…” and I’ve been struggling with identifying this for a while. One company I worked for, you could just see the decline in YoY profitability, yet they were on-boarding people (because…
Here it is: provide clarity where there may not be any, and enable the team to consistently and predictably deliver value to the company. Some may describe this as the intersection of UI/UX, Business, and Tech. Others may describe this as building the right feature at the right time. It…
One of the best lessons of product ownership I ever got was from a CEO who asked me “How did this get away from you?” My response was “Well, Marketing took it over…” He lost his shit over that response, and rightly so. The initial intent of the product got…
Building a solid product, or even building a solid product team, takes time. If you’re responsible for a product and you don’t understand this, it’s going to be a difficult time for both you and the team. Here’s an analogy. Races aren’t won on race day. They’re won or lost…
Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want (Strategyzer) by Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Gregory Bernarda, Alan Smith
Beyond the Obvious: Killer Questions That Spark Game-Changing Innovation by Phil McKinney