As a Product person, have you ever had difficulty prioritizing work and deciding which items hold the highest value? Try having a session with your respective business stakeholders prior to starting development to prioritize work based on business value. This means having stakeholders from groups such as marketing, operations, sales, etc. assign a point estimate … Read moreDetermining Priority and Value with Business Stakeholders
Does your company use product road maps for planning and growing the product toward the vision? Product road maps help build alignment among stakeholders and the product development teams. Here are some things I have found make up a valuable product road map: Focus on high level customer defined features being shipped over the next … Read moreVisualize Your Product through a Product Road Map
How often does a plan change? Have you ever experienced trying to stick with a plan, knowing that it is going to fail? Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” In an Agile organization, planning is one of the keys to success for any team. In the Agile Manifesto, this … Read moreImportance of Planning
User stories are a common term used in agile software development. I hear a lot of different definitions of how to do them and what the end result is. Let’s start with the history of a user story, why they were introduced, and then talk about ideal ways to use them. The term user story … Read moreUnderstanding User Stories
When developing a product or working on a project, do you find that you focus on too many priorities? Do you try and get everything done before getting feedback? Do you hesitate to have a customer try the product thinking that they may not like it? What if you started thinking in a different way? … Read moreGet Customer Feedback Quickly
Does your organization focus more on projects instead of products? Something that I have run into throughout my career is the focus on projects over products. This leads to a lot of disadvantages. In the book, Large Scale Scrum: More with LeSS, by Bas Vodde and Craig Larman, they list four disadvantages to the focus on projects … Read moreProduct Focus Over Project Focus
Do you find that your requirements change during development? The second principle of Agile states, “Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.” This principle also emphasizes the importance of changing for the good of your customer. In Scrum, the backlog/requirements are based on maximizing value of the … Read moreChanging Requirements