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 more Visualize 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 more Importance of Planning
Do you ever get the feeling that the processes at your organization aren’t adding value? Most likely, many of them aren’t adding value in terms of a Lean mindset. A typical process is 95% non-value added (NVA) to 5% value added (VA). The Lean Electronic Health Record The good news is that by focusing on … Read more Adding Value
Sometimes I find myself worrying about things I can’t change. They are outside of my circle of influence. When leading an organization or team on their agile journey, focus on what is in your control and how you can influence others to be more agile. I first read about Circle of Influence in Stephen R. … Read more Circle of Influence
User stories are commonly used in agile software development. I hear a lot of different ways on how to do them and the intent behind them. Therefore, I wanted to share my understanding so far based on my agile journey. Let’s start with the history of a user story and why they were introduced. The … Read more Understanding User Stories
Having had over 5 years experience in sales, I wanted to write a blog on Scrum concepts and how they can help sales team operations at a high level in a sales department today. As a sales representative, I would work with a team of up to 10 sales representatives all with the common goal … Read more Try Scrum Concepts to Improve Sales Team Operations
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 more Get Customer Feedback Quickly
Is anyone at your organization able to communicate the vision for your product? Having a vision for a product is very important. When there isn’t a vision, I have found that it is easy to get stuck in the day to day short term thinking of features and user stories that don’t roll up to … Read more Creating a Product Vision
Does your organization discuss changing the culture? What do they mention they are going to do to change it? I have a passion for organizational behavior and design. Having been a Scrum Master, one of the key areas of focus for me was driving change within the organization. Throughout my experience and learning of organizational … Read more Changing Culture
Have you been in an environment where the focus is on projects instead of products? Something that I have run into throughout my career is the focus on projects over products. This can lead to a lot of disadvantages. In the book, Large Scale Scrum: More with LeSS, by Bas Vodde and Craig Larman, they list … Read more Product Focus Over Project Focus