Books Books on Agile, Product, Design Thinking, Innovation to fill your library and grow your expertise: Product Management “Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love”, by Marty Cagan “Deliver Great Products that Customers Love”, by Valerio Zanini Agile “Scrum Mastery: From Good to Great Servant-Leadership”, Geoff Watts Product planning and MVPs “User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build
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
Use the 5D Canvas to plan your product 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
The 3 pillars of great products
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
Validate as soon as possible
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
Closing the Delivery gap
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,
Using Buy-A-Feature to rank customer value on a set of features
Buy-A-Feature is a great tool to source interest from your end-users about a set of features, and understand how they make trade-offs between them. It’s effective at providing a high-level prioritization based on your customers’ preferences, perceived value, and expectations. There are many versions of this tool, and many ways it can be used. This method can be used to
An MVP is not a Beta release
Organizations often misunderstand an MVP as the bare minimum set of functionality to produce an intended result. They associate an MVP to a “Beta release” and focus their effort on stripping down their product to minimize the development time and test the release as quickly as possible with their users. While this is not a wrong approach per-se, in my