The heart of successful product management and product development is a collaborating community of team members operating with shared goals, mutual trust, and learning mechanisms for evolving products and processes. I have found one of the best ways to create a healthy product community is with facilitated workshops. These workshops are usually driven by product management requiring buy-in of multiple work products including: Clearly defined product vision, goals, strategy, and quantifiable customer outcomes Market research results, competitive analysis, and pricing strategy User research and ..read more

“A large, global financial service firm (we’ll call it BigFin) was three years into its journey to adopt agile ways of working. To accelerate customer experience improvements that had already been achieved, the technology infrastructure division decided to align its structure and delivery to become product-centric. The focus was primarily on products used internally by its employees. Toby Sinclair, an internal coach in the strategy and transformation team, brought in Ellen Gottesdiener to fill gaps in the team’s product management knowledge and experience. With Ellen’s product coaching experti ..read more

This essay is part of the book 97 Things Every Scrum Practitioner Should Know, by Gunther Verheyen (editor) Alice, wandering in Wonderland, said it best. “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” This certainly applies to software development teams. Even some of the best Scrum teams can’t answer the simple question, “What is your product?” Scrum is about continual discovery and delivery of products. For a product to be successful, it must be desirable to customers, viable for the business, and feasible for technologists to build and support. Notice t ..read more

In my recent Modern Agile Show interview with Joshua Kerievsky, we discussed product management in an agile context, product discovery and delivery, collaboration, and more. Here are some visuals to supplement our conversation: The Product Partners: Product work: Discover to Deliver möbius (first published the book by the same title, in 2011):   (NB: you can now download a pdf of the Discover to Deliver here). A reusable framework for designing any collaborative engagement. The book Requirements by Collaboration (2002) first introduced the “6Ps”: Purpose, Participants, Principles ..read more

For a number of years, I’ve heard: “I really like the frameworks for product discovery that you shared in Discover to Deliver. How can we facilitate collaborative discovery with distributed teams or for large-scale products?” My answer—until now—is to suggest things that colleagues, EBG readers, and I have done over the years: exploit existing technologies to make the collaboration happen. For example, teams work concurrently on their Discovery Boards with live video cameras in different locations. Some teams resort to sharing photos of their evolving Discovery Boards. Others use Google docs o ..read more

The Product Canvas can help address a number of challenges as you transition to a product-centric organization. You may want to take a step back to rethink your product strategy. Perhaps you realize you’re not organized for optimal product development and need to redesign your organization so its structure follows product. Or maybe you need to improve your product management practices. For all these scenarios, defining your product is your starting point. The Product Canvas has two parts. In my last blog, “Using the Product Canvas to Define Your Product: Getting Started”, you learned about the ..read more

In my product coaching work, I often find product people (Product Managers and Product Owners) struggling to do too much. It can be exhausting to attempt to do everything rather than focus on doing only the right things. There needs to be a way to do two things. First, show how Product Managers and Product Owners can lean on their development team while providing appropriate product leadership. Second, show how a product development team supports product people. It is vital that product people have the bandwidth to focus on product strategy while building healthy interdependence and increasing ..read more

Originally published on www.mindtheproduct.com, 24 October 2019. Product managers can make better decisions if they’ve built transparency and trust with their team. How these decisions are made is also important, and it requires a clear and collaborative process. Here’s a straightforward framework for collaborative decision making that is founded in transparency and trust. Product Decisions Product decisions are either tactical or strategic. Tactical decisions usually result in short-term actions – like deciding which backlog items to focus on the next delivery cycle and which experiments to r ..read more

I recently had the pleasure of being part of the “Women in Agile” podcast (available here). In the podcast, I discuss infusing product management with agile principles and practices. Leslie Morse, the podcast interviewer, summarized the highlights of our conversation as follows: “Ellen speculates a future where there will be a “blending of disciplines where you don’t necessarily have a business area and a technology area”, just one product team with interdisciplinary team members. Her piece of advice to product people: Have strategic awareness of your product in the marketplace or “Big-View ..read more

“So, what is your product?” That was the key question I posed in my Agile Cincinnati keynote recently. In my product coaching work, I have come to realize that many organizations don’t have a clear and consistent answer to this fundamental question. This has serious consequences. A poorly defined product impacts your ability to respond to changing customer and market needs. It results in less than satisfying product outcomes. It causes organizational and communication woes. It thwarts organizations efforts to scale agile product development. Everyone in your product development ecosystem shoul ..read more