The Clever PM

Tips, tricks, and hacks that help you to be a better, more clever, Product Manager.

Why Your User Stories Suck

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I find it ironic that one of the most fundamentally important aspects of Agile planning is so very often terribly implemented.  User Stories are the single most important thing that a Product Manager/Owner delivers to their development teams — they’re the foundation on which everything the team does is gauged; and all too often, quite frankly, they suck.

The impact of the vast suckitude of these user stories is far-ranging, and does not go unnoticed.  Bad user stories are one of the biggest causes of complaints on the part of development teams, the cause of endless friction and misunderstanding on the part of stakeholders, and ultimately result in missed deadlines, failed sprints, and Armageddon itself.  Okay, maybe not quite that last part, but it sometimes feels like it.

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Be careful what you put on your backlog…

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We’ve all had the conversation…you’re working at your desk, just finished a call with a customer or prospect, and that random person comes around and taps you on the shoulder…

“Where’s my feature?”

“Huh?  What feature?”

“You know — the feature you talked about last week.”

“Oh, that one!  It’s on the backlog.”

“I know, so when is it coming out?”

“Well, it’s…on the backlog.”

“Yes, I know.  So I told our biggest customer they’d have it next month, that’s cool, right? It’s on the backlog, after all!”

“YOU DID WHAT!?!?”

…and so it goes, and you wind up randomizing the teams to deliver what’s been promised, tossing out a good chunk of strategic work that you’d planned on doing.

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What “Agile” Means to the Business

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Agile development and its related methodologies and practices have long been viewed as something that “developers do” with no consideration given to the broader impacts of those processes on the organization as a whole.  This, incidentally, is also the primary cause of failures on the part of organizations who attempt to implement Agile practices — the belief that all that’s changing is how the developers create, test, and deploy their code, and everyone else in the company proceeds on with business as usual.

Unfortunately, such a belief is far from the truth — in reality, companies who change from a rigorous, planned product process to an Agile process have to face the fact that they have to change the way they do business from the ground up, if they expect to gain the benefits of those changes across the board.

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Incremental Improvement – Why You Need to Change the Wheels While the Bus is Moving

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There have been numerous situations in my career as a Product Manager where I’ve come into a project or product that’s so established and critical to client success that there’s a strong hesitancy on the part of anyone to dig in and muck with what’s “working”, even if it’s not really “working” in the eyes of the customer or user. This is, sadly, the fate of many B2B applications that have been in place for more than 5 years or so — B2B systems tend to be designed to meet specific goals and specific purposes, then have additional capabilities “bolted on” afterward, with little or no attention paid to how everything works together or what the overall user experience is.

And, what you wind up with in those cases is a runaway bus that needs to have the engine tuned, the wheels changed, the outside painted, and the upholstery redone — all while the bus remains in transit, and while it’s entirely full of passengers.

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Dropbox: The Most MVP of All MVPs

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It’s constantly surprising to me that people seem to have such widely different ideas of what the term “MVP” or “Minimally Viable Product” really means.  Perhaps it’s a result of the term becoming an industry buzzword, or perhaps it’s because it’s used in some very different contexts, but it always baffles me that people focus on the “minimal” part of the term and completely forget the “viable” and “product” side of things.  To me, you don’t have an MVP unless you meet all three criteria:

  • You have identified the minimum set of features necessary to engage your users and to solve their valuable problem;
  • You have identified a way to ensure that your solution is scalable enough, stable enough, and valuable enough that you can confirm your product hypothesis; and
  • You actually have something that you can sell, market, or test.

Whenever I think of what MVP means to me, I think of Dropbox, the cloud-based file-sharing system that pretty much encapsulates everything that an MVP should be.

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Prioritizing in an Agile World: What’s Now, What’s Next, What Else?

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While helping through a transition with a PM and Dev team that I worked with on a daily basis, one of the major stumbling blocks I ran into was Release Planning and Roadmapping.  When I got there, they were in many ways using all of the right Agile terms, but not really following Agile principles – each release was meticulously planned out in advance, then chopped up into deliverable components that were split into two-week work increments.  In private, I often joked that they were using “AgileFall”.

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Product Manager or Product Owner – What’s the Difference?

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In the search for a Product Management role, many people become confused by the deceptively similar descriptions, expectations, and requirements that they find for Product Owner and Product Manager roles in various organizations. I’m sorry to say, this is another reflection of the inability of our Product Management culture and discipline to adopt a clear standard for what a Product Manager is and what a Product Manager does.  The roles are similar enough that there’s an easy and excusable amount of confusion, but they are also different enough that it’s important to discuss these differences, why they exist, and what they really mean for a person seeking a “true” Product Management (or Product Owner) role.

To be honest, I could have chosen any number of seeming homonyms for Product Management — there’s Business Analyst, Program Manager, Product Leader, Product Designer, and many, many more.  But the problem with picking any of those other terms is that they’re just as amorphous and nebulous as “Product Management” is.  Thankfully, that’s not the case with the term “Product Owner” which has some clear definitions and expectations thanks to its close relationship with Scrum/Agile development practices.

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