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InsideProduct

Hand-picked resources for product owners, business analysts, and product managers working in tech-enabled organizations. Check out the resources I offer below and sign up for my newsletter!

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Practical tips for dealing with product reality

2024 has not been the best year for the product management community. Tech companies continue to right-size their staff after overheated hiring during the pandemic. Anecdotally, those cuts seem to hit product managers particularly hard. Whether that is the case, the product management job market has certainly tightened up from the free flowing money days of 2021 and 2022. Then, the release of Transformed: Moving to the Product Operating Model seemed to draw wildly different reactions from the...

18 days ago • 7 min read

It’s a common feature of transformations to describe the target for the transformation in terms of contrast. The agile manifesto is probably the most well-known example with its “this” over “that” format. For product transformations, the phrase that fits that model is outcome over output. It makes sense to focus on outcomes, because we want to encourage product teams to make decisions and measure success based on the problems they solve, not necessarily the featured they deliver. But that...

24 days ago • 11 min read

This week, I’m distracted with the first two rounds of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. As a result, I’m writing this as I wait for the second rounds of games to start later this afternoon. I’ve had tickets to go to the games in Omaha Nebraska for several months without regard to who was playing here and was fortunate enough that my alma mater, Iowa State University (Go Cyclones!) got seeded to play here. It’s mere coincidence that this week’s topic is collaboration with your product...

about 1 month ago • 4 min read

The term best practice is frequently used to describe a process, technique, or practice that was successful for one team, organization or industry that others copy, hoping if it worked for them, it will work for us. Unfortunately, a practice that works great in one context may not work as well in a different context or may be entirely inappropriate. There are no best practices, only appropriate practices. You can avoid the lure of best practices when you understand the conditions under which...

about 1 month ago • 3 min read

For most my career, I’ve worked at tech enabled organizations. Think large enterprises industries like financial services, insurance, and retail. In the earlier part of my career, I filled business analyst or project manager roles in these organizations, often providing a bridge of sorts between “the business” and IT. Based on the structure of the IT organization, I often had to do quite a bit of coordination to make sure the different IT teams focused on different parts of the tech stack...

about 1 month ago • 4 min read

I have the pleasure of offering a workshop titled “How to Survive and Thrive in a Digital Transformation” at the Building Business Capability conference in April. The premise of the presentation is many tech enabled enterprises are going through transformations and individual contributors, especially business analysts, often get the short end of the stick. My intent is to show that people have some control over how transformations impact them, but they have to be their own advocate and not...

about 2 months ago • 3 min read

I have the pleasure of offering a workshop titled “How to Survive and Thrive in a Digital Transformation” at the Building Business Capability conference in April. The premise of the presentation is many tech enabled enterprises are going through transformations and individual contributors, especially business analysts, often get the short end of the stick. My intent is to show that people have some control over how transformations impact them, but they have to be their own advocate and not...

2 months ago • 7 min read

When organizations create a new process, or overhaul an existing process, there’s one type of decision that rarely gets the consideration it should. That decision - as you may have guessed from the topic of this newsletter - is whether to build or buy the software used to support that process. It often seems like the folks involved don’t even realize they have a choice. Some organizations build everything… because they can. These are typically the organizations that even though they aren’t...

2 months ago • 6 min read

As I was preparing to write this week’s issue of InsideProduct, I deviated from my originally planned topic to delve into the user interview topic one more time. I had the opportunity to visit a customer of the product I’m currently working on and as I prepared for the visit I realized I’ve gotten lazy with my note taking. Since I work remotely almost exclusively all my interactions are via Zoom or Google Meet and both have real handy recording capabilities. This visit was going to be…gasp…...

2 months ago • 5 min read

A couple of weeks ago, I explored how user interviews can help with your discovery efforts. One of the key messages was the questions you ask will go a long way to determining how effective your user interviews are. You need to know what you’re trying to find out, and you need to ask people questions about what they actually do, not what they think they might do. You want stories, not predictions. And you may have read that newsletter and said “sounds like a great idea. An example would be...

3 months ago • 1 min read
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