As I was walking down a trail outside of Vancouver, I encountered this warning sign. It was one of several signs highlighting the risks some cliffs ahead posed to life and limb. Clearly, those who came before us failed to consider the risks, and they installed both a fence and numerous signs in the mild …
Product Management
Mediocrity
Product teams launch mediocre products when we fail to learn as we build. We build for months, even years, never truly learning if we are building the right thing. “What differentiates the success stories from the failures is that the successful entrepreneurs had the foresight, the ability, and the tools to discover which parts of …
Principles vs Rules
Certifications are an information-dense method of getting up to speed on the work we do as product managers. But they also can mislead us into thinking that this set of rules or process we learn are a recipe for success. We can forget to think about them as principles to guide, and we fail to …
Patterns
As we transition from a Waterfall to an Agile approach to planning and product management, there is fear that there will be no plan, no organization, and long term vision. In the book, A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander captures well though how we can use patterns, starting small and growing bigger to create a town …
Cannibalizing Your Product
What would it look like to cannibalize your own business, your own product? Clayton Christensen said it well when he wrote – “The fear of cannibalizing sales of existing products is often cited as a reason why established firms delay the introduction of new technologies.” If we fail to disrupt ourselves, then we will allow …
Defining your MVP
What exactly is an MVP for your product? Some see it as a way to avoid feature creep. Others as a way to phase out development. Still others will argue it’s a prototype or a mini finished product. I’ll leave the definitive answer to someone else, but one thing must be true. You need to …
Rework is Agile
Rework or change requests are the enemy to a project manager. But to the Agile Product Manager, they’re the result of learning. I don’t believe we are truly Agile if we only plan to build and release each feature once. To me that’s gambling. To be Agile, we must admit that we need to learn …
What are your competitors doing?
What warning signs from your competitors might you be missing? Just before the start of World War II, pilots from Japan set numerous flight records outlined in a recent Air & Space article: “The flight of the Mitsubishi Ki-15 was the first of an impressive series of Japanese distance and endurance flights during the buildup …
Limited by your Leadership?
There’s an infamous bridge, known on the internet as the “11 foot 8” bridge or the “Canopener Bridge”. Here is a quick example of the bridge in question: I think our leadership abilities can similar to this bridge, in that they can limit us and our teams. And they can do so in a destructive …
What is your product hypothesis?
What do you believe is true about your product that you’re actively trying to prove right now? Maybe it’s a new feature, a new subset of features, or even a whole new product, but you need to identify a hypothesis. The power in calling it a hypothesis, is that it declares to everyone around you …