Jan Bosch
One of the hardest things for us as human beings is to adequately balance focus on our own goals and drivers and the needs, requests and influences of others. We all know people who sail their own course no matter what others ask of them and we know people who are so responsive to others … Read more
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
In this series, we have, time and again, stressed the importance of using data. We presented a variety of arguments to justify our focus on data, but they all center around the notion that, as humans, we’re highly able to create stories to explain why things are happening that, when more carefully inspected, turn out … 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
We’ve already talked about exploration as an activity in an earlier post. We need to conduct exploration activities, of course, to find new functionality to add to the existing offerings and to identify new offerings to create. However, exploration is also a mindset and a viewpoint we need to take for the activity to even … Read more
Many, including those in R&D, may view technology as part of the R&D realm and outside the scope of product management. The thinking is that the product manager decides what needs to be built and R&D decides how to build it. In practice, however, the technology choices are so influential on the strategic options available … Read more
