Product Innovation, Agile Transformation, Design Thinking
Toby: I am Toby Russell. I am the co-CEO of Shift. We run a company that essentially sells cars online and we are the first, truly omnichannel, e-commerce player, for used auto, which allows customers to buy a car right there on the website or have a car driven to their home to test drive and buy it right there
We were half-way in Sprint Planning and suddenly it hit me. Like a light bulb turning on. I had been listening to the discussion between the Developers and the Product Owner and all seemed normal… until this very moment. I just realized that the team was planning their sprint with absolute no idea of velocity or capacity. How did I
I always struggle with the word “requirements”. This is how specifications and functionalities are normally called when working on a project. Requirements create a blanket of necessity and limit the empowerment of product managers to be effective at solving problems. The word requirement, and its verb counterpart to require, in their essence define something that is “required”, “needed”, “expected”. The
We have compiled a list of books and articles on Agile, Product, Design Thinking, and Innovation. These books and articles offer perspectives, frameworks, and real stories for the successful application of product management practices to the ideation and development of new products. If you are a Product Owner, a Product Manager, or a Product Leader, these books and articles are
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
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 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
We have become increasingly good at building products. Agile, DevOps, Lean Startup methodologies have reduced the time to market and the complexity of deploying a new set of features, while improving the quality and shortening the feedback loop with customers. Armed with these methodologies, product managers can ideate, design and build products in shorter times, deploy them in the marketplace,