Prioritising

How to prioritise work and create a shared understanding of what a team is working on

A Crystal Ball to Prioritize Technical Debt

Adam Tornhill offers an overview of techniques that help uncover both problematic code and the social dimension of the teams that build software. He illustrates each point with a case study.

Benefit-Driven Metrics: Measure the lives you save, not the life preservers you sell

So ultimately to start this exercise, you should throw out all the standard metrics (conversion rates, pageviews, etc.) and just focus on one thing: what are your customers measuring?

Product Thinking vs. Project Thinking

While project thinking focuses on coming up with solutions up-front and then delivering against a schedule, product thinking keeps the focus on the outcome. That involves some level of comfort with uncertainty and learning, which can be pretty hard. But if we want to get to the right outcome, and not just an on-time output, it is really the only way to work.

Seven questions to build a roadmap

Techniques for building a roadmap and how the use of language can help align your pure agile or mixed methodology programmes.

Observations on Data, Metrics & Goals

Always set a goal, even if only to force you to be thorough about the levers, relationships and tradeoffs within your product.

How To Build A Product Roadmap Everyone Understands

If you’re getting a lot of feedback for Single Sign On, then it’s not time to drop everything and build 10 new ways to sign into your app. Rather, it’s time to set up a new roadmap card like the ones you see below and start pulling all this feedback together to help you explore the best way to start solving this problem.

This enables you to communicate with your company that you’re aware of the problem and that you’re thinking about it, but you don’t have to provide anyone with the exact solution at this stage.

Options, Not Roadmaps

An option is something you can do but don’t have to do. All our product ideas are exactly that: options we may exercise in some future cycle—or never.

Without a roadmap, without a stated plan, we can completely change course without paying a penalty. We don’t set any expectations internally or externally that these things are actually going to happen.

Free Your Product Roadmap and Ditch the Timeline

It’s a bold assumption that you know exactly what to build, especially months in advance. The best product people aren’t the ones who make assumptions about the future and drive towards them. Instead, they know to surround themselves with experts and to ask the best questions. They know that markets and constraints change and that the best way to take advantage of opportunities is to remain lean with a flexible product roadmap.

On Writing Product Roadmaps

Learn how to create a product roadmap, along with a detailed example. A must read for PMs in any org past the product-market-fit stage.

Making sense of MVP (Minimum Viable Product) – and why I prefer Earliest Testable/Usable/Lovable

Many projects fail badly because they do Big Bang delivery (build the thing until 100% done and deliver at the end). I’ve lost count of the number of failed projects I’ve seen because of this (scroll down for some examples). However, when Agile is presented as an alternative people sometimes balk at the idea of delivering an unfinished product – who wants half of a car?