I’m back from Agile2024, and it was good to be back after a 6 year hiatus. I caught up with some old friends, made some new acquaintances, and had some great discussions along the way. Some of those discussions will influence future issues of InsideProduct, and others will go down as obnoxiously long running inside jokes. If you're wondering about the latter, ask me about retractable stairs or comic sans the next time you see me. While I’m not going to talk about those topics here, I did want...
4 months ago • 3 min read
For the last few weeks, I’ve explored what prioritization looks like in a variety of different scenarios. This week finished up that series with a look at how you can go about prioritizing a bunch of stakeholder requests. This is a common scenario when you’ve already built software for your company (ie internal product) and you’re trying to optimize or maintain it. A unique aspect for internal products is that most requests for changes come from other people inside your company who may, or...
4 months ago • 5 min read
Last week, we talked about how to prioritize your new product development efforts when you’re trying to get to product market fit. Once you hit that sought after milestone, your product moves into the growth stage of the product life cycle and you switch into product optimization. So it makes sense that optimization is the next scenario I’ll explore on InsideProduct. It seems like everyone is talking about product optimization If you’re not sure what I mean when I say product optimization, go...
5 months ago • 3 min read
Here’s the next in a series of issues on prioritization. This week’s issue looks at prioritization when you build a new product. Some people refer to this as going from 0 → 1. In the world of internal products, you can think of this as what you need to do to enable a brand new process in your organization. The general prioritization approach for new products is very similar to what I described for rebuilding existing products. You decide what features your product will and will not have, then...
5 months ago • 5 min read
n rebuilding a product A couple weeks ago, I sent out an overview of key points product teams should consider when making prioritization decisions. In that overview I promised to explore different scenarios in more depth. So here’s the first scenario - replacing an existing product. Product replacements are a common activity these days, especially for organizations undergoing a digital transformation. I’ve had the…opportunity?… to lead at least three product replacement efforts so I’m...
5 months ago • 5 min read
Last week, I sent out an overview of key points product teams should consider when making prioritization decisions. And promised to follow up that issue with dives into specific contexts. I also encouraged readers to reply with questions and suggest scenarios. One of the emails I received had a great question about prioritization in a scenario I hadn’t considered. So while I’m working on the deep dives I planned, I thought I’d share that reader’s question and my response. Could frameworks...
5 months ago • 5 min read
An Overview on Priority Prioritization, or more specifically deciding what you will and will not build, is a key product management activity. It’s equally important for a tech product that your company sells as it is for an internal product that enables your company’s business processes. You could even say that it is the most important activity that product people do. But how you do it varies widely depending on your context. You take a different approach to deciding what you do when you’re...
6 months ago • 5 min read
I had hoped to get this out earlier, but after a week being away, I had to get caught up in the day job. I spent the week of April 15th along the east coast of the United States attending two separate conferences of product people. At least groups I consider product people. The attendees at the first conference may not think of themselves as product people. Yet. It was insightful to go from a conference for business analysts to a conference for product managers in the same week. So in this...
7 months ago • 7 min read
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...
8 months ago • 7 min read