Posts on Product Management

Workshop by Design Canvas: Making Collaboration Work

The heart of successful product management and product development is a collaborating community of team members operating with shared goals, mutual trust, and learning mechanisms for evolving products and processes. I have found one of the best ways to create a healthy product community is with facilitated workshops.

Continue reading

Lessons Learned in Becoming a Product-Centric Organization

“A large, global financial service firm (we’ll call it BigFin) was three years into its journey to adopt agile ways of working. To accelerate customer experience improvements that had already been achieved, the technology infrastructure division decided to align its structure and delivery to become product-centric. The focus was primarily on products used internally by its employees.

Continue reading

Answer This Question: “What is Your Product?”

This essay is part of the book 97 Things Every Scrum Practitioner Should Know, by Gunther Verheyen (editor)

Alice, wandering in Wonderland, said it best. “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” This certainly applies to software development teams. Even some of the best Scrum teams can’t answer the simple question, “What is your product?”

Continue reading

How to Make Product Decisions With Transparency and Trust

Product managers can make better decisions if they’ve built transparency and trust with their team. How these decisions are made is also important, and it requires a clear and collaborative process. Here’s a straightforward framework for collaborative decision making that is founded in transparency and trust.

Continue reading

Women in Agile Podcast Highlights

In the podcast, I discuss infusing product management with agile principles and practices. Lesley Morse, the podcast interviewer, summarized the highlights of our conversation as follows:

“Ellen speculates a future where there will be a “blending of disciplines where you don’t necessarily have a business area and a technology area”, just one product team with interdisciplinary team members. Her piece of advice to product people: Have strategic awareness of your product in the marketplace or “Big-View”, and get rid of junk in the backlog.

Gottesdiener also takes us down the memory lane to the beginnings of the Agile Conference – she has attended every one of them since Salt Lake City. She reminds us of the women who have had a large impact on the Agile community from the very beginning.”

Continue reading

What Is Your Product?

“So, what is your product?” That was the key question I posed in my Agile Cincinnati keynote recently.

In my product coaching work, I have come to realize that many organizations don’t have a clear and consistent answer to this fundamental question. This has serious consequences. A poorly defined product impacts your ability to respond to changing customer and market needs. It results in less than satisfying product outcomes. It causes organizational and communication woes. It thwarts organizations efforts to scale agile product development.

Everyone in your product development ecosystem should have a shared, consistent, and coherent answer to the fundamental question, “What is your product?”

Continue reading

Retrospectives Make Better Product Outcomes

Frustrated with the outcomes of your products? Are you, as a product manager, struggling with your development team? In my work as a product coach, achieving less than stellar product outcomes is all too common.

Surprisingly, the solution to better outcomes may be right under your nose. The answer is in retrospectives. To create and sustain a culture for creating better product outcomes, product leaders encourage and participate in product retrospectives. Retrospectives tap into the wisdom of the product community to continually learn and improve the product as well as the product development process.

Continue reading

Doing the Right Things, Not Everything:
Product Management and Ownership

In my product coaching work, I often find product people (Product Managers and Product Owners) struggling to do too much. It can be exhausting to attempt to do everything rather than focus on doing only the right things.

There needs to be a way to show how a product development team supports product folks and how they can lean on their development team while providing them with appropriate product leadership.

Continue reading

Product Discovery Frameworks for the Virtual and Scaled Enterprise

For a number of years, I’ve heard: “I really like the frameworks for product discovery that you shared in Discover to Deliver. How can we facilitate collaborative discovery with distributed teams or for large-scale products?”

My answer—until now—is to suggest things that colleagues, EBG readers, and I have done over the years to leverage existing technologies available to hack a way to collaborate. For example, have concurrent teams working on their Discovery Boards with live video cameras in different locations. Or use Google docs, slides, Trello or real-time boards for shared space ‘wall work’. Even resort to asynchronous iterations of photos of wall work.

Until now.

Continue reading