In ‘Productorio’, a poem by Dante’s lesser-known younger brother Dino, we read the account of a well-meaning product manager at the shores of a large machine learning implementation. There, he meets with the poet Yourdon, who proceeds to walk Dino down Product Purgatory’s iteration roadmap, making sure to swerve into each of the seven infamous…
Month: August 2018
Dean’s Product Owner Prioritization Bingo Board
For those times product feature prioritization makes about as much sense as a game of bingo. TL;DR — I attend quite a few product manager meetups. Invariably someone kvetches about prioritization. Here are some of those gripes gamified in the form of “Dean P’s almost famous, nearly patented, PO Prioritization Bingo Board ™ v0.02.” (recently updated on 27Jun20)….
The Orange Quarrel: A Product Manager’s tale of Compromise over Collaboration
Photo Credit of Nick Jr. and Yorgos probably not wrestling over an orange: Wikipedia As product managers, we are sometimes confronted with “feature hostage negotiations.” Here are some conflict resolution tips for such times. You know what I’m talking about, those emotional instances where the tug between sales needing shiny objects and stakeholders seeking strategic…
Product Manager Exercise: Design a better Automated Teller Machine
Clearly, some ATM designs are better than others. Into the course of every product manager’s life falls a “design a better <whatever>” exercise. In fact, I recently stumbled on a site solely dedicated to this appropriately titled ‘Product Management Exercises.’ It was this site, along with a recent news story related ‘You no longer need a…
T is for Testable - Part 6 of 6 of why it pays to INVEST in your user stories
TL;DR — Equipping your PBIs with a clear and concise user acceptance criteria is the how you can ensure doneness across your team, stakeholders, & customers. I think it was Zig Ziglar who said “If you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time.” While he made that comment in the context of personal development, it…