Agile

What does it really mean to be a “Technical” Product Manager?  And how is it different from just a Product Manager?  In this post, I share the difference between these titles plus key Do’s and Don’t’s to help you succeed as a Technical Product Manager. You might have noticed many variations on the Product Manager job title.  Some companies have Strategic Product Managers, Read more »

You’ve got sprint planning coming up and, looking at your backlog, you see that there is nothing ready for the team to work on. I have talked to quite a few product people about this and no matter how experienced they were, all of them told me that this is a situation they’ve encountered at Read more »

I have a confession. I share it in the belief I am in the company of my brethren; I am an accidental product manager. Two years ago, I did not know a user story from a bedtime one. A notification from an alert. And a gherkin was still just a tasty pickle. But 24 months Read more »

Minimally Viable Feature approach (MVF) is creating enough of the feature to test the adoption and usefulness before expending lots of resources on fully building out the feature. In the case of ProdPad, we created the simplest form of the roadmap we could, with just enough functionality to be useful and yet provide users with Read more »

Agile methodologies extol the virtues of releasing early and using feedback to guide your product decisions. For new products, this philosophy works well and can avoid wasting effort building features that users don’t value. However, agile techniques often hit problems when used on established products due to stakeholder fears about brand and experience damage. The Read more »

Tom Loosemore is the Deputy Director at the UK’s Government Digital Services and was responsible for the recent launch of a single domain, user centred government website – gov.uk. In his talk at our product management conference Mind the Product 2012 he discussed the genesis of that project and how he and his team managed Read more »

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” – Alan Kay Every so often, I hear someone suggest that you can’t really build a roadmap when you’re working in Agile, because you’re only planning one iteration at a time. That, my friends, is nonsense. In this article I’ll describe a lightweight planning Read more »

The public discourse around startups, product management and UX has become a touch dogmatic for my taste lately. If you’re not following the Lean Startup(TM) to the letter, holding daily scrums, doing continuous integration, embracing failure or (pick your own buzzword) you’re apparently doing something wrong. But I think this sort of dogmatic thinking is Read more »

I knew what I wanted to discuss as I started writing on the index card at the start of ProductCamp London: roadmaps – we’re all Product Managers after all, so roadmaps are what we do. Everyone has a roadmap right? Well yes, but it seemed almost too obvious or somehow banal to bring up – Read more »