2024-03-31 19:45
Most people and teams conflate prioritizing and sequencing of work. Prioritization is the process of deciding what is important to do, and sequencing is deciding what order to do it in. Shap… Read More
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Tyner Blain | Agile Product Management And Strateg Blog
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Helping start-up and enterprise companies achieve software product success through strategic and agile product management and business analysis.
2023-11-20 21:22
I’m excited to be joining my friend Jon Harmer, Lead Product Manager at Google, in teaching Product Mangers how to drive business impact. In our cohort-based class on Dec 2-3, 2023, wi… Read More
2023-11-13 15:23
Product strategy manifests as a collection of bets, investment decisions to do something or not, to do things now or later. A business case requires you to compare the predicted costs with t… Read More
2023-11-07 21:14
Your process can prevent collaboration. The language you use in your problem statements can stop collaboration too. When you use proxy variables instead of economic measures of outcome you p… Read More
2023-11-01 18:46
When deciding what to measure, we often choose metrics which sound good or metrics which are easy. These mistakes can make a product strategy incoherent, excessively expensive, and ineffecti… Read More
2023-10-23 16:02
Estimating with ranges requires a level of transparency which may be uncomfortable because you are acknowledging what you don’t know. Doing this, however, cascades into multiple positi… Read More
2023-10-18 19:30
Product management is fundamentally a discipline of decision-making. Which investments to make, which problems to solve, which customers to serve, etc. The approach we take to decisions is f… Read More
2023-10-11 14:45
Quantifying the impact of your problems puts them in perspective. It also exposes the assumptions you’re making, creating a virtuous cycle helping you to improve your framing of the pr… Read More
2023-10-03 18:39
Good product management is understanding the problems your customers want to solve, how your customers get value from solving those problems, and figuring out how best to help them. We need… Read More
2023-09-25 13:13
There is more to identifying who’s problem you’re trying to solve – you need to also have a sense for the context in which they experience the problem. Problem statements s… Read More
2023-09-18 13:25
There’s a difference between who is exposed to a situation (many people) and who experiences that situation as a meaningful problem they would like to solve (a select few). It is impor… Read More
2023-08-28 13:22
In my previous article, I shared an improved template for writing problem statements. Knowing a good structure is necessary, but you also need to avoid filling the good template with bad con… Read More
2023-08-17 16:39
To improve how you build products, you need to write problem statements defining which problems you intend to solve. This helps your thinking, shapes your strategy, and creates purpose for y… Read More
2023-08-10 15:04
Every company competes in a dynamic market. Staying the course is drifting off course. When you don’t use problem statements to express your intent, there are no signals to help your o… Read More
2023-07-31 23:05
The overwhelming emphasis I see in product organizations is on sequencing the execution of the product strategy over the upcoming quarters. Optimizing the product operations work to deliver… Read More
2023-07-21 17:54
Most of the teams I’ve helped either didn’t use problem statements, or didn’t use them well. Without improving, they spend more time and money than needed to build things… Read More
2022-08-31 19:41
Helping teams to shift from a task-focus to writing user stories requires a different approach than simply introducing user stories as a new tool. You have to adapt the existing practices… Read More
2022-06-23 19:32
When evaluating a product, a customer may see the product as special, adequate, inadequate, or awful. What is uncomfortable for product teams is they have no control over how the customer se… Read More
2021-11-09 16:57
The shift from inside-out to outside-in is necessary to become more effective as a product development organization. We cannot build it and (expect) they will come. Here’s how to thin… Read More
2021-09-27 17:40
A common suggestion from product development teams when asked how to improve their working environment, is to “spend less time in meetings.” I’ve felt this way personally w… Read More
2021-01-23 16:10
Orienting to value – every team, every person does it differently. How you orient to value limits how much value you can create. People with a naive orientation can only sc… Read More
2020-07-03 08:49
When solving complex problems at scale, we use epics, features, and stories to align, focus, and coordinate the work of multiple teams to achieve the objectives of our organizations. … Read More
2019-04-08 14:29
In
our continuing series on managing the risk in your backlog, we look at the risk
of kidding ourselves. Specifically, we use cause and effect and hypotheses to
identify the assumptions in o… Read More
2019-02-04 12:27
When deciding how to invest in your product, you need to take into account the risks that your investments will not return the outcomes you desire. One class of risks is business risk, … Read More
2018-11-26 11:43
As Steven Haines first told me, “strategy first, roadmap second.” There is a step between the two – deciding which problems you will focus on solving with your product. St… Read More
2017-09-10 16:00
Understanding your users is critical to developing good products. A “complete” understanding is sometimes required, and always comes at a cost. A contextualized unde… Read More
2017-07-10 11:43
You know you’re a product manager when this image causes more than a chuckle. A few random thoughts inspired by this Rorschach test of product management concepts from sunk cost falla… Read More
2017-06-11 22:44
The pop-culture concept of a silver bullet – a simple solution to a hard problem – is a dangerous idea. It can be used to over-promise, and doom a team to under-delivery… Read More
2017-05-24 13:42
Taking agile, a process otherwise optimized for small, cross-functional, collaborative teams and making it work at scale is fascinating. You have to change some elements, and retain others… Read More
2017-01-09 03:44
Assumptions are interesting things – we all make them all the time, and we rarely acknowledge that we’re doing it. When it comes to developing a product strategy – o… Read More
2016-10-06 10:48
Being “outside-in”, “outcome-based”, and “market-driven” is particularly important for creating successful products. The problem is that just sayin… Read More
2016-07-22 11:38
Defining and building a good minimum viable product is much harder than it sounds. Finding that “one thing” you can do, which people want, is really about a lot more… Read More
2016-06-03 12:14
How do you work with professional services, consulting, field engineers, etc. to make your product better? Do you just treat their inputs as yet another channel for feature requests, o… Read More
2016-04-13 03:30
Product owners and product managers. Two roles, often done by one person. Together, the product people need to take an organization’s strategy, figure out the appropr… Read More
2016-04-07 03:38
If you ask someone if they require encryption on their device, first of all, you will likely get one of two answers – yes or no – useful for segmenting your market or devel… Read More
2016-03-30 15:59
Product owners are likely to find themselves alone in the organizational wilderness. Their organizations expect them to connect the towers of long-term strategic planning with the fron… Read More
2016-02-18 02:41
Software as a Service is not a one and done transactional offering. A product or business built on SaaS is built on the subscription model – recurring revenu… Read More
2015-04-30 06:01
Fundamentally, product management requires you to assess, synthesize, and prioritize the needs which drive the creation of your product in the context of three main objectives: desirability… Read More
2015-04-07 21:32
Last month, Mike Smart of Egress Solutions and I gave a webinar for Pragmatic Marketing on product roadmapping when working in agile environments. We had a great turnout of over 1500 p… Read More
2015-02-11 13:25
You’ve got some shiny new segmentation data about prospective customers; how much they earn, where they are located, how old they are. How does that help you make decisions about your… Read More
2015-01-05 13:02
Forbes quoted Steve Jobs as saying “I’m as proud of what we don’t do as I am of what we do.” This is a really enlightened perspective – and a way to enfo… Read More
2014-12-10 19:01
We hear a lot about building products which are “good enough” or “just barely good enough.” How do we know what “good enough” means for our customers? &n&helli…Read More
2014-12-03 18:22
Your product roadmap is a view of what you are building right now, in the near future, and in the more distant future. Or is your roadmap a view of why you are building what… Read More
2014-11-12 19:39
“Agile” is something most teams do wrong*, without realizing they’re doing it wrong. A good 2×2 matrix acts as a lens, helping to convert information in… Read More
2014-08-01 23:10
Theodore Levitt may have developed the whole product model to help companies compete more effectively with their products. We wrote about the whole product game based on Mr… Read More
2014-06-12 16:08
Agile is not magical. Changing from a waterfall process to an agile process changes how your team works, and helps eliminate inefficiencies. Adopting an agile process does not let you magic… Read More
2013-08-07 16:10
Paddy Barrett in Ireland is preparing his Master’s thesis on Product Management and would like to interview (USA) state-side product managers for his primary research.  &helli…Read More
2013-08-01 16:07
How can Theodore Levitt’s classic Whole Product approach help with defining a product roadmap? I’ve been revisiting his concepts and their use recently, thinking about how… Read More
2013-07-17 14:59
There is a lot of advice out there for how to write requirements. There is not as much discussion about why to write requirements. Spend some time thinking about why you write requirements… Read More
2013-07-09 12:56
There are several ways to answer the question “is agile cheaper than waterfall?” Here are two of my favorites:
“It depends. Agile done well is cheaper, as long as you meas… Read More
2013-06-25 14:33
Is your team focusing on the mechanics of creating good software, without understanding the connections from your efforts to your goals? Are you primarily focused on the structure of use ca… Read More
2012-10-17 13:51
Wrapping up the your product failed because you didn’t enable your users to realize value branch of the root causes of product failure, is this article on the context in which yo… Read More
2012-09-25 13:53
Next up in the series on the root causes of product failure – products that fail because you have ignored the user’s level of experience. The first time someone uses your… Read More
2012-09-11 13:29
This article continues the series exploring the root causes of product failure. Even when you target the right users, and identify which of their problems are important to solve, you… Read More
2012-08-29 13:30
Having an outside-in bias as a product manager is important – you need to understand how your customers (or your customer’s customers) would value capabilities you might build i… Read More
2012-08-14 14:31
Continuing the series on root causes of product failure, this article looks at the impact of focusing on the wrong user goals. Even if you have picked the right users, you may have pi… Read More
2012-07-31 13:35
Exploring the reasons that a product might fail in the market is a useful way to triage and assess what you need to do to prevent the failure of your product. Instead of taking the &l&helli…Read More
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