I was asked an interesting question the other day: “Given what you’ve learned about search, natural language processing, & machine learning, how would you approach a new search project from the ground-up?” Great question, and now that I’ve had a couple days to think about what I’ve learned across 3 separate search initiatives, here are…
Category: Product Management
My thoughts on all things product management I hope add value to your day.
V is for Valuable - Part 3 of 6 of why it pays to INVEST in your user stories.
TL;DR: Why INVEST in a user story that’s not valuable? Good question. Here’s a pragmatic how-to guide to making the Value magic happen in your PBIs. Step 1 — Avoid Mission Statement Metrics One of my favorite quotes about corporate mission statements comes from Vincent Flanders, who reminds us that most can be summarized generically as “All…
My Career Roadmap … Visualized
How do you go from Opera Singer to Programmer to Product Manager in 10,350 days or less? Good question. Above is a fun little infographic — followed by its story — on how I landed on this visualization of my career roadmap. Two weeks ago at a local gathering of product peeps otherwise known as ProductCampRTP, I was asked:…
N is for Negotiable — Part 2 of 6 of ‘Why it pays to INVEST in your User Stories’
TL;DR: If you’re looking to INVEST in your user stories by making them Negotiable, then for Pete’s sake don’t write them like requirements. Code by Contract As someone who prefers the Build-Measure-Learn approach to discovering and then delivering the right thing of value at the right time, nothing is scarier than reading the following words from…
I is for Independent — Part 1 of 6 of ‘Why it pays to INVEST in your User Stories’
As an agile team, we don’t want the delivery of our work on story X to be held up by story Y or condition Z. User Story As an agile team, we don’t want delivery of our work on story X to be held up by story Y or condition Z. Description Hi, and welcome…
Why it pays to INVEST in user stories
TL;DR — Love’m or Hate’m, it’s hard to deliver software that matters without user stories that are independent, negotiable, valuable, estimable, small, & testable. Here is one way you might want to make this magic happen. As you may be aware from some of my other posts, I attend some not-to-hush-hush meetups here near Raleigh where product…
Am I the very model of a modern product manager?
With apologies and gratitude to both Sirs Gilbert and Sullivan, I have shamelessly appropriated their famous Major-General’s Song from their popular 1879 comic opera ‘The Pirates of Penzance.’ Based on the raucous reception to my singing the first 2 verses at the end of my presentation “Five Things I Learned About Lean MVP as a…
Some methods in persona creation I learned from singing opera
Stuck writing a persona? Are your character archetypes really just surrogate synonyms for roles? Acting! It can help! One of my favorite recurring characters from Saturday Night Live was that of ‘Master Thespian’ as played by Jon Lovitz, a hilarious play on the overblown pontificating that plagued theaters up into the 19th century. It slays me…
10 things singing opera taught me about product demo prep
TL;DR — Enjoy these 10 handy tips on preparing for software product demos I learned during my short career as a professional opera singer. At about the 1:30 minute mark of the video drama titled ‘Apple Keynote Failures’ we witness yet another reminder that even the best-laid plans of mice and men tend to blow up badly…
How to avoid a visit from your friendly neighborhood Technical Debt Collector
TL;DR — Everyone is fine with deferring technical debt, that is until ‘Tony from Support’ shows up w/a bug that breaks your app’s kneecaps. If mob movies were framed as software development, imagine how many story lines would read as follows … … Pamela the Product Owner, desirous of saving “Saint Jerome’s Home for Abandoned Bambinos” from foreclosure,…