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What is Bad Performance? Before I discuss how you can help an underachieving team, let’s briefly explore what good performance looks like, assuming that an agile, Scrum-based process is used. Second, the team participates in continuous discovery and strategizing , and its members regularly help refine the product backlog.
I then do various interviews with executives all the way to Product Management team members and surrounding functions. At the end of this review, I do a Product Leadership workshop with C-Suite and Product leaders, where I show them what good looks like, and they have a chance to reflect on where they are.
Whenever you are faced with an agile, dynamic environment—be it that your product is young and is experiencing significant change or that the market is dynamic with new competitors or technologies introducing change, you should work with a goal-oriented product roadmap, sometimes also referred to as theme-based. 1 Focus on Goals and Benefits.
At JCDecaux, I led the development of an information kiosk for airport passengers. Passengers are also able to view hotel information and use the devices to speak to the sales team of the hotel. Feasibility risk impacts the capacity of the team to build the product given time, skills and technology constraints.
Manage the Product, not the Team. Focus on your job as the product manager or product owner, and manage the product, not the team. Treat the Team as an Equal Partner. The team members are not your resources but the people who create your product. Assume that the team members want to do their best.
How product managers can navigate leadership challenges Today we are talking about four leadership motions that enable increased organizational effectiveness and productivity and alleviate organizational friction, waste, and indecision. Sharing the four leadership motions with us is Janice Fraser. Measure outcomes.
A few years ago, I was asked to help a healthcare company with their agile transition and its impact on product management. One of the challenges the agile transition team was concerned about was the choice of the right product backlog tool, which at first seemed odd to me. The Product Backlog is Too Big.
What’s more, it’s not uncommon in my experience that product owners have to do their job without the support of a Scrum Master or agile coach. For example, I’ve seen organisations where the Scrum Masters work with HR and the developmentteams to recruit new team members. So why is the role important?
Listen to the audio version of this article: [link] The Core Product Team Product teams come in different shapes and sizes. But all product teams I have seen consisted of the person in charge of the product—the product manager or Scrum product owner —and developmentteam members.
It’s all too tempting to fall back onto less skilful habits and become impatient, tense and stressed, say something we regret afterwards, or pass on the pressure to the developmentteam. Challenging situations are great opportunities to grow as a human being and by doing so, you increase your leadership power. Trust me.”.
TL; DR: How to Make Agile Work in Fast-Growing Startups For years, I worked in several Berlin-based, fast-growing startups in my capacity as Scrum Master, agile coach, and Product Owner. These are my lessons learned on making ‘agile’?—?including including Scrum as a framework?—?work work in a fast-growing startup.
The ideas of Agile are great. Three mindsets of product development. Design Thinking is how we explore and solve problems; Lean is our framework for testing our beliefs and learning our way to the right outcomes; and Agile is how we adapt to changing conditions with software. Agile is related to Lean. Jeff Bezos.
Has the spirit of being agile been lost behind a mountain of rules? Agile vs. Being AgileAgile became popular shortly after ‘The Agile Software Development Manifesto ’ was published in 2001. Companies who focused on being agile saw great success, and others wanted to follow suit.
So, it was natural that we should want to develop a talent growth plan for our people. Each month we send out an NPS survey to assess whether the company is being a great place to work, but a few months ago I also sent Google’s manager feedback survey to my team of 10 product managers. Team execution and development.
Embracing new technologies like machine learning, micro services, big data, and Internet of Things (IoT) is part of that change, as is the introduction of agile practices including cross-functional and self-organising teams, DevOps, Scrum, and Kanban. Determine the Right Learning and Development Measures.
An in-depth review revealed that misaligned goals between IT and customer service teams, coupled with outdated processes, were the primary issues. This experience became a powerful example of how identifying and addressing root causes can drive both business results and team morale. and take action to make it happen.
And leaders have an outsized impact on team performance. She shared some insights on human behavior, and how we as leaders can use our influence to build a culture of psychological safety, enhancing collaboration and problem solving in our teams. On the tactical front, we talked about the good and bad sides of data.
I once worked with a telco company that was developing a brand-new commercial product. Product management and development were located at separate sites in different countries. The technical complexities were greater than anticipated and the development progress was slower than forecasted. To Collocate or Not.
I once worked with a telco company that was developing a brand-new commercial product. Product management and development were located at separate sites in different countries. The technical complexities were greater than anticipated and the development progress was slower than forecasted. To Collocate or Not.
I founded Prodify so my team and I can help companies by sharing knowledge from our previous experiences. It’s not because they’re bad at what they do. Often the senior leadershipteam thinks they talk about strategy a lot, but the employees under them don’t understand the strategy.
For product strategy and roadmap meetings, I recommend involving the key stakeholders , for example, someone from sales, marketing, support, and finance, as well as developmentteam representatives—ideally members who know about the user experience (UX), architecture, and technologies. This might be your Scrum Master or an agile coach.
It can be hard to reach the required level of buy-in without using design-by-committee , brokering a weak compromise, and agreeing on the smallest common denominator—which is hardly the foundation of a successful product. This approach makes it easier to reach unanimity and consent without making weak compromises.
1] Figure 1: An Empowerment Model for Product People and Teams Level one represents the authority to decide how features are detailed and guide their implementation. Level three, finally, allows product people and teams to develop the product strategy including the value proposition and business goals.
You might feel weak. Or, you might worry your colleagues see you as weak or incompetent. See Leadership Tip #4: Admit When You Don’t Know.). Many of us know what that feels like as a technical team member. Don, a CIO, attempted to “install” a common agile framework. Are you wary of asking for help?
TL; DR: Why Agile Turns into Micromanagement Agile turns into micromanagement as a result of the middle management’s resistance to change. Self-organizing, empowered teams often conflict with the middle management’s drive to execute personal agendas, self-preservation being one of them. be it tech or legacy.
How product management teams can make better innovation decisions I am interviewing speakers at my favorite annual conference for product managers, the PDMA Inspire Innovation Conference. This episode is sponsored by PDMA, the Product Development and Management Association. I would say that was a pretty bad decision.
On the other hand, the Scrum Master theses also cover, for example, the relationship with the Product Owner, they deal with agile metrics, and how to kick-off an agile transition, thus moving beyond the original framework of the Scrum Guide. The role of a Scrum Master is primarily one of servant leadership?—?or and coaching.
She currently leads Product Management at Obo, where she is working on agile product management software that aims to reduce the high failure rates for new products. Also, we talk in the beginning about Jill’s experience developing the Adobe Creative Cloud; lots to learn just from that. I believe that career is a team sport.
Prescriptive Agile frameworks make it hard for designers to add valuable contributions to the team. I designed every detail in Photoshop before handing the mockups to the developers. Desperate to find an alternative to our ineffective process, I stumbled upon Agile and it blew my mind. But it wasn’t all that bad.
Agile has been shown to shorten time-to-market, increase quality, instill predictability, improve customer satisfaction, and create an overall happier working culture. Agile Transformation involves all levels of the organization and applies Lean-Agile principles to business processes, practices, tools, operations, and culture.
Or “ How to Manage Software Development in Teams who Think Nothing Like you “ Product management has two diversity problems. Cultural homogeneity in product teams is dead, welcome cultural diversity. Every day, I lead a product standup for a team of four engineers: Syrian, Chinese, Ukrainian, and Singaporean Chinese.
A topic that’s come up several times recently in my product leader coaching sessions: how much to delegate to the (individual contributor) product managers on our teams – including different ways of building product skills and balancing personal empowerment against good results.
That is where I spend much of my time helping product managers and teams. The other sphere is competency in what is often called the soft skills and aligned with leadership. We have created the 7 7 7 leadership transformation model. One is competency in the processes, practices, and tools of product management.
Much has been written about the process of creating product roadmaps, not least the six great articles written by my own team. I believe the actions of a product leader all too often are the root cause of a “bad” roadmap. Without thoughtful leadership around them, it may not be in product manager’s gift to achieve a “good” roadmap.
Want to advance your career in mobile product management or find top talent for your team? You will collaborate with engineering, design, and business teams to deliver cutting-edge mobile solutions that improve efficiency, user adoption , and overall product performance. Who would be a BAD fit for this job?
On June 26, 2017, English football team Crystal Palace enthusiastically announced the appointment of the great Dutch defender Frank de Boer as its new manager. He announced he would take a middling team and turn them into a whirring, possession-based team emulating the lofty ideals of Total Football. The Parable.
As a product leader, you are the product manager for a leadershipteam, and the tricks you learned in product teams remain valuable, they just need a little tweak. Myths that an organisation tells itself can act as a reality distortion field that masks failing products and poor return on investment. Value Proposition.
This focus on short-term solutions aligns well with the belief in agile and continuous deliverywe need to deliver quickly and provide user value. Last but not least, in customer-oriented and agileteams, decision-making criteria are often narrowed down for efficiency to a single question: What business value does this bring to the customer?
I redesigned the internal and public web properties and was promoted into my first “product leadership” role. I became director of communications, leading the development of intranets and web applications. Challenges aside, I enjoyed the close-knit teams and easy access to upper management which enabled quick decision making.
On the ANE panel last night, an agile coach asked, “What's my path forward as an agile coach? Focus on business results, not agility per se. Teams might feel pressure from a too-large backlog or too-long roadmap. Not because people are somehow bad, stupid, or wrong. Nobody wants to “be agile.”
Hope also does some leadership coaching with her own company, Fearless Product. Teresa: For those of you that are Product Talk readers, Melissa writes our Product in Practice series where we’re sharing stories about teams doing great discovery work, so you may have seen her name there. And that’s not a bad thing.
I work in the tech industry & manage a team of around 12 people with a range of product, delivery & engineering skills. As a leader in tech, I have a variety of responsibilities, but I see my main role as building, enabling & motivating teams to deliver great digital products. To my mind, these are the most important parts.
Value stream mapping is a common practice in the Agile space because it allows leaders and stakeholders to see where the flow of value delivery is slowing down and exposes opportunities to create better alignment across teams. Then it becomes a tool to help diagnose a problem (which is usually when Agile coaches are called in). .
Realising it would be safer to diversify, he’s gone on to spend the last 30-plus years working with more than 90 organisations across the world in interim leadership roles and consulting. We talked to Rich about leadership, how to make sure that your next job is with the right company, and how to win friends and influence people.
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