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…
Tag: Agile
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…
S is for Small - Part 5 of 6 of why it pays to INVEST in your user stories
TL;DR — While it’s good to think big, we need to act small, especially when we iteratively measure value in a CI/CD software release setting. Dang that Goofus and his IEEE 830–1998 SRS, why can’t he be more ‘Scrumtastic’ like Gallant? When I think of a small Product Backlog Item (PBI), I’m thinking of one that is reduced…
E is for Estimable - Part 4 of 6 of why it pays to INVEST in your user stories
TL;DR — A good user story can be estimated. We don’t need an exact estimate, but just enough to help the rank and schedule the story’s implementation. If the above TL;DR sounds familiar, it’s because it’s practically an exact quote from Bill Wake’s 2003 blog post that introduced the INVEST approach to product backlog items. And sure,…
As a product manager, how would I approach my next AI-augmented, full-text, asset search…
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…
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…
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…