Leadership

One of my main pet peeves with Agile is that it, at heart, is a reactive paradigm. The mindset is that we’re in a “steady as she goes” state, there’s some event external to us and we react to it in an agile fashion. In many companies where the business side and the engineering side … Read more

The first blog post in this series discussed the challenges that people are experiencing when working with the agile paradigm. In general, there are three main areas that Agile considers out of scope and that, in my view, need to be included in the succeeding paradigm. These areas are product management, systems engineering and scaling, … Read more

In recent months, I’ve started a series of online and in-person workshops around Agile. These workshops have focused on the challenges of Agile, the things in Agile we want to keep, the things we want to remove as well as practices that we seek to add. Here, I intend to discuss the key elements of … Read more

We started this series with an exploration of the importance of extending our focus from only how to build the systems we’re responsible for to the why and what of these systems. When we only look at the how, we tend to focus on efficiency: cranking out as many features as possible per unit of … Read more

Few topics are discussed more often in companies than the organization. How to organize people into teams? How to organize functions into departments? Where to allocate responsibilities? The problems of the existing organization. How much better things would be if we did it differently? And so on. This is particularly the case with product management … Read more

The final dimension in this series on digital product management concerns roles and responsibility. Surprisingly, in many traditional organizations, product managers have significant responsibility but surprisingly little authority. Instead, they need to align all the relevant stakeholders and reach decisions based on consensus. Traditionally, this challenge is addressed by building a product management function where … Read more

After having discussed principles, activities and scopes, we’re now moving on to the different viewpoints product management needs to consider. The coming posts will explore these. Specifically, we’re going to focus on stakeholders, technology and exploration. Stakeholders, as the name implies, are parties that have a stake in whatever is going on. In our context, … Read more

Thomas Edison, the alleged inventor of the light bulb (he wasn’t), famously said that genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. The same is true for product management. We can explore and strategize all we want, but if we don’t act on the findings and the strategy, all these efforts are in vain. … Read more

Few words in corporate lingo are more overused than “strategy.” Frequently, problems in companies are attributed to the lack of a clear strategy. In practice, however, it often is the lack of alignment around the strategy. This tends to lead to a situation where there’s an official strategy in the documents and presentations and another, … Read more

To state the obvious, product management is about managing products. Often, the product manager is described as the CEO of the product, expected to decide on everything that touches it. In practice, things prove to be significantly more complicated and product managers often spend a considerable part of their time on stakeholder management. Previously, we … Read more