Late last month, after a particularly frustrating meeting I posted the following tweet: It turned out, not surprisingly, that I wasn’t the only one dealing with this failed project management approach. Many people reached out with virtual “high 5’s” and, more importantly, questions about how this could be so obvious to those of us who … Continue reading Fixed time, fixed scope projects always end in 1 of 3 ways. None of them good.
One of my favourite questions to ask any new client is, “How do you measure success?” I pose this question to product teams, discipline heads and executives to understand what the organisation values and what they reward. One hundred percent of the time the initial response is, “That’s a great question.” After giving it some … Continue reading Defining value: the most ambiguous word in product development
Ask any executive what the top 3 metrics they watch in their company are and you’ll get some combination of revenue and sales metrics and, of course, the company’s NPS. Net Promoter Score, a measure of customer satisfaction and loyalty, is so widespread and common that over two-thirds of the Fortune 1000 claim to use … Continue reading NPS is a waste of time. Use these metrics instead.
One of the biggest challenges in product management is planning the work in a linear, visual way. Sure, we’ve had “roadmaps” for a long time but they betray the true nature of software development. Digital product development is not linear. It is iterative. We build some things. We ship them. We see how they impact … Continue reading What does an agile product roadmap look like?
(Part 2 of this post can be found here.) Despite having co-written an award-winning book on the topic and lecturing, teaching and coaching on the topic for nearly 10 years now, I still get many questions — mostly from product managers, executive leaders, and technical managers — on how to integrate UX and Design into the scrum process. It’s … Continue reading Here is how UX Design Integrates with Agile and Scrum
One of the biggest obstacles in changing the way your company works is undoing the years, often decades, of institutionalised inertia of “the way things have always been done.” There’s comfort in doing things the same way. It made us successful. It made us big! And, perhaps the most persuasive argument: no one ever got … Continue reading What if “the way we’ve always done things” is the fastest way to agility?
So you’ve made the leap to Objectives and Key Results. Congratulations. And you did it right. You wrote qualitative objectives that were aspirational and inspirational. They’re aligned to your strategic goals and the executive team is on board. Your Key Results are written as measures of behavior (your customers’ or your employees’), just the way … Continue reading What happens after OKRs?
Last month our webinar featured Tim Herbig, Sense & Respond press author of Lateral Leadership. Tim discussed ways to lead even if you’re not the boss. Watch now.This post was originally published to my newsletter subscribers (14k of them now). If you’d like to get these in your inbox sign up here As the wars on … Continue reading The executive’s secret weapon to agility
Last month our webinar featured Jonathan Bertfield and Sonja Kresojevic on how to make the case for Lean Enterprise change. After their presentation I interviewed them on the specifics of their ideas. Watch now.This post was originally published to my newsletter subscribers (13k of them now). If you’d like to get these in your inbox sign … Continue reading Give teams a problem to solve, not a solution to implement
The next Sense & Respond Press book (our fourth) is going to be Lateral Leadership: A practical guide to managing agile teams by Tim Herbig.Sometimes you’re not in a position of authority yet you still need to lead a team. Tim shares his experience and insight on how to be an effective product leader even … Continue reading No amount of technology will make you “digital”