Building quality-in and keeping technical debt in check are two of the most important goals to support long-term sustainable product development. Adopting the right engineering practices allows teams to focus on innovation and value delivery, rather than wasting time on fixing problems or avoiding quality issues. BookingBug faced a near-death situation when it had accumulated too much technical debt due
Technical debt is a silent enemy of every product team
Technical debt is the silent enemy of every product team. Product development activities are hectic, as teams try to jam as many features as possible into a single release, and as the business pushes for higher productivity. At times, development teams make shortcuts as they push for a deadline; make architectural choices to fit into the current environment and delay
What is Scrum?
Scrum is an Agile framework for developing new products and extending existing ones with rapid cycles of incremental development and customer feedback
Your Go-to-Market strategy simplified
I’m often asked to help teams prepare a Go-to-Market strategy to prepare for the launch of a new product. I’d like to share a few simple steps I use when preparing to deploy a product. What is Deployment? To deploy a product means to launch it in the marketplace and make it available to its users. This phase is also
If Agile fails, blame Product management
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.
Use Product Journey Maps to plan your next MVP
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
What’s in an Agile transformation?
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
Using Design Sprints for rapid innovation
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
Plan across the 5 Dimensions of great products
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
10 tips for effective customer interviews
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