Product Innovation, Agile Transformation, Design Thinking
Solid Product management and discovery practices are at the foundation of any product development effort. I often find that when Agile fails, it’s not because “Agile” doesn’t work. It’s because the organization has not taken the rights steps to foster a product development mindset. Here I share a few tips on how to support Product and Agile transformations.
A Product Journey Map is a great tool to help planning your next MVP – Minimum Viable Product – create transparency on the plan, and create a User Story Map
Today’s market is increasingly competitive as new products are launched daily and entire industries are thrown upside down by innovators. Think of Uber and Lyft, how they have revolutionized the taxi industry, which — caught by surprise — is struggling to redefine its identity and maintain market relevance; or the recent purchase of Whole Foods by Amazon, the leader of
The idea behind a Design Sprint is to compress the time it takes to go from idea to validation for a specific problem to just a few days, rather than weeks or months. A Design Sprint brings together principles of Design Thinking and Agile, in a structured, time-boxing format. Originally designed by Google Ventures, the format of a Design Sprint
Once you have a Product Vision and an initial understanding of the customer needs and the opportunity, it’s a good time to look ahead across all 5 Dimensions of great products and begin thinking about the activities to do at each stage of the product development process. As we discussed in several occasions, there is a risk in approaching the
I’d like to share a few tips for making customer interviews effective. Why is this important? Because delivering a great customer experience starts with insightful understanding of customer needs and the customer’s point of view. We call it listening for the Voice of the Customer (VoC) which is the process of understanding the customer’s expectations and validating the outcomes of
I have worked in a variety of organizations across different industries, helping my teams or my clients build successful products. From Cisco to Capital One, from my startup Goozex.com to clients I have advised, from private organizations to the military, I have found three common elements that successful teams must have to deliver great products. These elements are the three
A developer approached me at a recent Agile conference where I was presenting a topic on building great products with small iterations, and he said, “I wish I had known this a year ago….” He had taken on a new project from a company that provided a full document of requirements upfront. They wanted to build a new system and
BookingBug (now Jrni) faced a near death event due to technical debt and saved itself by adopting the right engineering practices. Bookingbug is a company that provides scheduling and appointment-setting capabilities across a variety of industries. Founded in 2008 in the UK, in recent years it has built a strong reputation among enterprise customers around the world for its powerful
The meeting with the customer did not go well. The prototype was not yet finished, and the customer wasn’t able to grasp the qualities of the idea he was presenting. This project was already over budget, and there was no clear line of sight on its completion. By all measures, it was taking too long to put together, and the