Happy, Horror, and Inspirational stories from managers tasked with the unenviable task of getting stuff done.
A future-proof multichannel notifications strategy helps PMs stay in touch with their users without coming off as intrusive, non-responsive, or antiquated.
After reading this article, you’ll have the confidence and the tools to set up a notification system that delights and doesn’t annoy.
I still remember my first day at Outbrain. As part of the Bootcamp (training program), we were required to clone the code from a repository called the trunk (one monolithic repo that contained all our codebase). It took at least half a day to clone and build the whole source code. Over the next year or two in which my team worked with a monorepo, we just suffered — cloning the repo was time-consuming; the slow build/release time frustrated us; flaky tests and bad commits affected all the engineering; and let’s not even mention the IntelliJ indexing time, which easily afforded us time to run down for a chatty coffee break.
The ultimate guide on how to manage young PMs in your team. Includes Dos and Don’ts, examples and modus operandi using which I wish I was led/managed early on when I started as a PM. Also, young PMs could takeaway lessons from here on what to expect and ask from your managers.
I’ve been asked many times what is product management in a tech startup and how the job differs from product management at a larger company with a more mature product.
Over the course of my career, I have had the pleasure of building multiple products from scratch, and have collected some strategies that help the process of building a new product and lead to a highly productive and streamlined experience for all stakeholders involved. Story mapping is one of those.
My personal recipes on how to change your career and land your dream job at any age coming from a different background
If you have decided to transition into product management but do not know how to begin, you are definitely not alone. This career was ranked as the top 5 job on LinkedIn's Most Promising Jobs for 2019, and in extension has gained many enthusiasts.
I recently came across this very interesting Twitter thread which claims that:
I am a Stripe fanboy. Back in 2014, I remember being mighty impressed at the ease with which we were able to implement a seemingly complicated thing - the billing infrastructure at Zinrelo - using Stripe. Right from the discovery to on-boarding, the API docs to the error messages, everything with Stripe was a cakewalk. And not a single time did we have to interact with a human being at Stripe’s end. After a couple of years, I had a similar experience with another product - Intercom. Integrating Intercom and the whole product experience in general was exceedingly simple requiring no human interaction.
Transitioning into product management can feel like being air-dropped into a war zone. From the moment you hit the ground there are new people and ideas bombarding you from every angle, and everything seems to be on fire. There is no clearly defined way to reach your destination, but you know you can’t just sit there. For most new product managers starting out, this is a critical moment for your career and the habits you build out as a product manager.
Expectations, surprises, and lots of learning.
This article is Part 1 of the ongoing series From Zero to Product Manager. A set of articles that help you transition to a Product Management role. In this post I explain what a Product Manager (PM) is and how the role can differ across companies, I describe the best qualities of an excellent PM.
You may have heard the analogy that developing software is a lot like building a house.
This study shows what lets product managers enjoy their work: culture and company types, roles & responsibilities and team’s alignment, frameworks and methodologies to work with backlog prioritization and impact estimation.
A game with post-it notes that can be played both in-person or virtually using Mural or Miro for learning about your partner's likes, dislikes, and opinions.
More and more developers are eyeing up Product Management as their next big career move. There's got to be a good reason for this trending transition...right?
Even if you are not directly concerned with QA and testing, it is recommended that you at least know the types of tests that need to be run at various...
Feature flags give product managers room to experiment with features. It allows the gradual rollout and enables them to streamline audience access to features
I was recently asked to engage in a debate over whether or not there are deadlines in agile. There were a few folks involved in the debate and the predominant perspective seemed to be that true agile efforts have no external deadlines - all deadlines are self-imposed by the team in the form of an iteration commitment or a scope negotiation with the Product Owner.
Useful tips on how to write your resume if you are looking for a product manager job.
Meet Noonies 2021Nominee Gagan Gehani
A relevant list of software-related concepts that every product manager should know to better understand a developer's point of view.
Git is awesome if you know how to use it effectively. It's not just a backup system! Here are 10 best practices for version control with Git.
Product managers, especially in startups, have to deal with a ton of different tasks on a daily basis. Could some of those tasks be made easier with ChatGPT?
In this article, we talk about omnichannel analytics, why analytics are hard for notifications, and what we believe is needed to empower PMs.
Hold daily standups. Ideally, this will take an hour every day.
Product manager interviews usually include a section on metrics. As a data scientist at Uber, I’ve often given or helped friends prepare for these interviews. The difference between candidates who crush the metric questions and those who struggle turns, as far as I can tell, on whether they have a framework that they can apply.
Startups are unpredictable, but there are a few common mistakes that every product startup is doomed to make! What matters more, is how you react to them.
The AARRR funnel divides your users' journey into 5 steps. These funnel priorities can be mapped against the stages of your product lifecycle to develop OKRs.
A collection of 56 ideas I came across or developed working as a product manager in 2021.
In 2019, I decided to write a book to help new and aspiring product managers land a PM job and launch their careers. My Book, Principles of Product Management, is Now Available!
In a recent encounter with agile community, I was asked ‘what agile means to me’. Simple question but difficult to answer provided the nature of question being open ended. This certainly got me thinking. I started skimming through multiple ways I can answer this question. I had to revisit my past and reflect on different phases of my agile journey.
Software engineers create all those great platforms and tools for every other industry, and yet, engineering leaders struggle to understand the work of their engineering teams. They struggle to correlate engineering output to business value.
The number of smartphone users is exploding. This opens up SO many opportunities to be successful in mobile product management today.
In my previous post I described how to apply the Double Diamond - a tool of design thinking (https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/news-opinion/what-framework-innovation-design-councils-evolved-double-diamond) - to product discovery. In this post I will be diving deeper into diamond two (D2) where we address four types of risk as defined by SVPG:
Developers already have GitHub open and are using it daily. Therefore, it seems only natural to use GitHub as a project management tool.
Naturally, the responsibility of choosing the right solution by assessing every aspect of the problem and its possible solutions falls on the shoulders of product managers. As a matter of fact, most common challenges faced by product managers are hefted with the weight of trade-offs. You can learn how to deal with these tradeoffs just by keeping a few things in mind and having a structured decision-making process.
Countless hours have been spent by teams all over the world debating over this. But really, should you?
The transition from sales-led to product-led growth model: What are the benefits and challenges of the product-led growth model.
Why a PM should care about the particularities of the users? Well, that is the irrelevant part of a product development, as you should know what the users demand.
People keep confusing agile with product development but they are different concepts. It’s important to make this distinction because it actually matters. It isn’t just semantics, the confusion is causing us all problems. Understanding this difference may fundamentally change the approach most organisations take to building digital products.
A list of reasons why you should try documenting your relationship on Notion
Everyone wants to go Agile today. Teams want to put the user in the center of their product development process while building products. After all, you are building the product for your users, right?
Your product roadmapping is a viable means to depict how this product is prone to develop, to adjust the stakeholders, and to procure a money related arrangement for this product. In any case, making a powerful guide is difficult, especially in agile development, where changes happen as often as possible and often out of the blue. In this way, there are things never to overlook while making your roadmap and sprint backlog. Remembering them will help you in making an intense agile product using scrum sprint backlog, the roadmap template and other powerful product management tools.
Product team goals and structure transforms together with the entire business. Follow these transformations through every stage of the company’s growth.
The first step in validating a product idea is not to build a MVP.
Everyone wants to go Agile today. Teams want to put the user in the centre of their product development process while building products. After all, you are building the product for your users, right?
Who’s a product engineer, anyway? It’s sometimes hard to distinguish between a product manager and a product engineer. In this post, we’ll have a try to figure it out.
There is a lot of talk about the Minimum Viable Product — a prototype with just enough features to satisfy early customers, and provide feedback for future development. But feature creep often starts much earlier, in the design & development, if not the ideation stage of a project.
I keep losing my best employees. I know I'm the reason, but I refuse to change. So how do I screw up my best people? I challenge and provide them with feedback.
Why web development is stupidly complicated, and why the solutions are stupidly simple
Product Managers (PM) are responsible for the growth of the product from the very first day. If the product succeeds, the whole product team gets the credit but if it fails, the PM takes complete responsibility for its failure. In this drive to make their product successful, PMs need to spend a lot of time with their product to make it simple and valuable for their users.
Large enterprises have lots of smart people with great ideas. Some of these people are charming, passionate and convincing. Some of these people are very good at lobbying for their idea with your boss’s boss. And some of these people have the patience and persistence of a Zen priest. And then of course we have our users and our customers. And governments and regulatory bodies (cough GDPR).
The curse of being a student is having a huge amount of educational fees unless you are sponsored by someone. Especially when you are having higher expenses on your educational essentials, you run short on money to manage your desk setup like the one you’ve seen on Youtube. But wait, it is really necessary to have a perfect setup?
Zoom has been in news a lot lately. It has gone from being an enterprise solution to a household name pretty fast.
Skilled IT workers are challenging to find and keep – and the talent shortage is bound to continue in 2022. But there’s a recipe that’s guaranteed to work...
A comprehensive guide to Product Manager Interview questions asked in top Product companies (Facebook, Google, Whatsapp, Instagram). How to design a product ?
As a product builder↗️, I built micro tools to solve my own problems. For example: article tool, portfolio tracker, SaaS tracker, habit tracker, and finance tracker
“No” is often equated with being mean but “no” isn’t about shutting projects and people down. Here's how to say no in a corporate setting without sounding rude.
How does tech debt cost you? Here are 6 reasons why managing technical debt should be part of your business plan.
The MLOps Conference took place earlier this week at Hudson Mercantile in New York City. Experts from the New York Times, Twitter, Netflix and Iguazio, the host company, spoke about best practices and machine learning implementation throughout a variety of different organizations.
There are many ways to create a product roadmap. Today, I'm introducing a new way of building a roadmap for your product development, with a one-day workshop.
My process in building things that can invent opportunities for our business and career
Start-ups are super exciting, fun and challenging. You have a notch above of all these when you join as a product leader/manager in start-ups where the product offering is unique yet interesting, the potential is high but the road ahead is less travelled and undiscovered.
Engineers need feedback so they can improve skills and deepen knowledge. According to the editor of the Inc. Magazine, Jeff Hayden, traditional metrics can be misleading, as they do not always offer a clear result. Evaluating the work of staff used to be difficult, before Git Analytics tools, such as Waydev came up with a data-driven approach to engineering leadership to help you bring out the best in your engineers.
Last week, one of my Product2kit customers who bought a no-code template asked if I can create a template for eCommerce use cases. I took his idea and came up with this online sneaker store. Here’s my app building process:
The toolkit to help you build MVP with $0 capital and 0 code
Discovery is undertaken in two steps with continuous iteration within each step. Step one is ensuring we are solving the right problem and step two is ensuring we are solving the problem right. This post is about step one in this process, AKA diamond one (D1) - my previous post explains step two, AKA diamond two (D2). I started this series with an overview of how to apply the double diamond to product discovery. Again thanks to the British design council for their very awesome double diamond.
This article provides definitions on what key metrics are, a framework for categorizing them, and recommendations of four basic rules to set useful metrics, using real-life examples.
Last year, after a bit of wrangling and lots of editing by the fantastic Jenn Webb, O’Reilly published a discussion Mark Burgess and I had on one of his trips through the Valley as a podcast.
There are many commercial Product Information Management (PIM) solutions available on the market. And there are 3 free open source solutions: Akeneo, Pimcore and OpenPIM that you can use to implement a PIM system in your company. I am going to compare these 3 solutions with each other.
Disclaimer: All characters and events depicted in this article are entirely real (and represents the protagonist i.e. the author himself). Any similarity to actual events or persons, living or dead, is strictly intentional.
“Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible,” ― Don Norman
I analysed the TOP30 fastest growing EdTech landings to understand their conversion techniques. Result – 42 CRO techniques you could leverage for your product.
The phone balanced high-end quality with a mid-range price tag, offering a top of the range smartphone on the level of a flagship Samsung Galaxy for half the price. When word got out — through social media and tech sites who marvelled at the quality to price ratio — consumer interest spiked.
As a software engineer, you have to find the perfect mix of tools and templates that can help make you more efficient in your day-to-day tasks.
When it comes to successful new product development, productivity is key. Entrepreneurs seeking to remain relevant, efficacious and profitable must continuously conceive and develop new products that not only make it to the market, but also deliver great value to target audience members.
UPDATE
How to Identify and Navigate Chaos in your Product Strategy
Why it is sometimes confusing to read about product management and why I wrote this guide: I actually wrote this guide in reaction to reading some other product management guides. I noticed that a lot of the guides I read were from pms at larger companies and didn’t actually have what I thought were the core pathways, skills, and experiences regarding product management. The guides did have a lot of tangential anecdotes, a lot of the typical hr-approved talking points of larger companies, and a lot of “check out this cool thing we did.” I tried to write this guide like something you’d hear after getting that Google pm drunk at a bar after the conference instead of hearing his talking points during the conference.
Curiosity may have killed the cat but makes a better Product Manager. True to this statement, I recently conducted a study on Product Management hiring in the US. We’ve all heard hand-wavy statements about Product Management growing, I was curious to know, ‘How much is it really growing? What’s actually responsible?’ I looked at publicly available data from Indeed and LinkedIn using the Wayback Machine and Google Search respectively to answer these questions and what I found out was pretty interesting as well as surprising.
Over the years of working with microservices, we discovered key points that you have to keep track of in order to maintain good ...
From product vision to engaging roadmap in 5 steps.
A deep-dive into iteration planning and predicting how long something will take
Mobile App Heatmaps: What they are and why they matter. UXCam mobile app heatmaps are one of the most powerful tools for mobile apps.
I often see MoSCoW being used to prioritise product development work, but for anything mildly complex (almost anything, really), and especially any product with more than one customer, it isn’t appropriate. Here’s why.
There are many possible approaches to launch a new product, and just as many obstacles along the way. However, there's a way of assessing the chances of success before diving in full commitment, and that's where the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) comes in.
We talked with Tim Sneath, Google's product manager for Flutter and Dart, about how both the language and the framework have evolved over the last two years, how they're being used today, and where they're headed.
You’re googling something. The first result seems promising. You open it. It’s a really long, messy article, and you can’t find your needle in this haystack.
This article is a compilation of everything that I learned about how to generate product ideas. It’s my my way of learning and it’s not a finished work I will update it as I learn more in my journey to great great products.
This is the fourth and final post in my series on an approach to product discovery - Double Diamond Discovery (again thanks to the British Design Concils super awesome framework). So far I have posted an overall view and then expanded on Diamond 1 (D1) and Diamond 2 (D2). This final post discusses the delivery track (https://www.jpattonassociates.com/dual-track-development/) and how this feeds back into the discovery track. In the diagram above there are two steps after discovery - “Delivery” and “Learn”. Although we want to have a ‘ship to learn’ (https://www.intercom.com/blog/intercom-product-principles/) mindset I need to emphasize most of the learning is done in D2 where learning is cheap and fast. There are always many new things to build/fix/improve so it’s easy to ship and forget. But shipping is only half the job.
Over the last 2 weeks, 7 friends have asked me how they can break into Product Management. Additionally, I have got an opportunity to interview several people from product management roles over the last year where I see first time candidates making the same mistakes over and over again.
In the fast-paced world of software development, there is a fine line between “doing it fast,” and “doing it right.” Deadlines and time-to-market often dictate a pace that can lead engineering teams to implement features or code fixes in the easiest way possible. The benefit of this is that a product can release fast and entice users to their functionality before a competitor has the chance to usurp said prospective users. The downside, however, is a lurking foe that software teams often ignore to at their own peril: technical debt.
I, Taras Zherebetskyy, Product Owner at Tradalaxy international marketplace[1], talk about transferring from service business to work with products and launching a new one.
Few years ago, when I was leading one of the top Belgian Applicant Tracking System, I had the opportunity to work closely with many HR professionals. Throughout my career I also hired a lot of people myself both for my companies and for others. As I keep seeing this topic arising on LinkedIn I went back to my blogging archives to republish an article on cover letters. I can’t wait to get your feedback.
Welcome to the first edition of Product Stories. The first product that I have chosen is Reddit — a company that thousands of startups have tried to emulate but always failed to do so. Let’s look at why that is and what’s so special about Reddit.
Believe most of us are already aware of what is expected of a Product Manager profile in any internet company, starting from being a mini CEO of the product to be the interface between business, UX & technology. Here in addition to those common attributes of a PM profile I am going to point out few not so common traits but important qualities a Product Manager should possess.
Here’s a scenario you might be familiar with. Say you’re starting a new role as a PM in a startup company (congrats!). You find that the startup has created a robust product with many different features and capabilities. Trying to gain some clarity and focus you ask: “which of those features are most/least used?”. Turns out, nobody knows. So you implement basic analytics mechanisms, wait for a week or two and then come back to the team equipped with a bunch of fancy graphs.
Neural networks are often generated to be larger than is strictly necessary for initialization and then pruned after training to a core group of nodes. Today, machine learning is now considered to be one of the biggest innovations used in a wide range of applications.
Advice and lessons learned from 3 months working as a product manager in the technology industry.
Planning as a principal engineer is all about bringing engineering, business, and people close together. Here are the things to consider.
If you’re working on something new, there are so many directions your work and product can take.
We asked our Product Management community, ‘Do Product Managers Need SQL/ Python?' Read all about what they had to say.
The architecture of the development workflow is designed based on the quality and quantity of releases. Here, quality refers to the state of bug-free or feature set in each release. And, quantity refers to the number of releases over the course of development. This architecture is not usually that complex; however, it can be a source of confusion.
The Laws of UX categorized under heuristics help us understand the cognitive and behavioral ways that humans generally interact with products. Let’s delve in!
Minimally Viable Products are a myth or, if you prefer a mental model. Always wrong but sometimes useful.
“I would describe an engineering manager as a Sergeant Major. They are very much part of the mission delivery team and manage a group of experts to perform specific tasks,” says David Ives, Engineering Manager at Pusher.
In this era of digital transformation, the ability to ship products quickly is a precious trait. Embracing the changes in technology and the newest innovations is no longer limited to the high-flying startups in Silicon Valley. Now, every company is becoming a technology company in some way.
At Hacker Noon's first All-Hands company meeting for 2020, CPO Dane Lyons talked the team through how the North Star framework applies to Hacker Noon. Since the term is pretty self-explanatory, I'll get straight to the story of how we're using this framework to prioritize activity.
What is a Product Roadmap?
How do tech's top companies innovate at scale? It's not just Agile. According to Empowered, it's product discovery, a focus on problems, and coaching culture.
Many teams and organisations jump into build mode too early. Then they build something that customers reject, they miss the mark, or they need extra budget to get it there. When you suggest a Product Discovery as a way to help get better results it gets rejected. This article is a way to answer the question: “Why do Product Discovery?”
All large organizations be it multinational corporations, big corporate houses, or global production units are applying Six Sigma techniques to better their business processes, nowadays. However, a huge misconception that ‘Six Sigma methodology doesn’t work for startups’ spins around it. Well, the universal nature of Six Sigma techniques and their effectiveness in process optimization and quality control make them an indispensable tool for organizations of all sizes.
Many product teams and startup founders buy into the theory of the Lean Startup, and want to “do lean” but don’t know where to start. In this blog series, I will provide a practical guide on how to apply these principles.
In the e-commerce industry, the key to success is instant delivery and constant updates. DevOps is a methodology for software development processes.
Logan Koshenka is a software engineer who graduated from Ohio University in 2018 and founded AccuFit, a custom workout app.
I first heard of Elium, formerly known as Knowledge Plaza, in 2011. I was attending a very small startup event where Gregory Culpin presented the company and its market vision.
Let's weigh up the risks of releasing vs. the risks of not releasing. Many organisations worry about the risk of releasing more than the risks of not releasing. People focus on what will go wrong if you release a product instead of what opportunities you will miss if you don’t release. If you want to ship great products, you need to have a more balanced and constructive conversation.
First, we need to talk about user research conducted with interviews.
I loved being a software engineer, or so I thought. On my last project working as an engineer, I fondly recall spending my weekends writing code to finish any user stories in my queue. It got to the point that I completed my work so far in advance that I was running a few sprints ahead of my team. I started to use my newfound free time during the week to sit in as many application requirement gathering meetings as possible. I began to collaborate more with our design team and shadow interviews with customers about the product we were building. I shifted into more of a mentorship role for our engineering team. At times, I found myself explaining the rationale behind a feature design decision and bouncing ideas around for an architectural approach in the same conversation. It took me a while to reach this career-changing realization; I was more interested in shaping the product than building it.
It’s been nearly four decades since Microsoft developed their Project application as an internal management tool to organize their various software development projects. In 1984, they released it to the public (on floppy disk…CDs didn’t really become a software download mechanism until the mid-90s), and within a few years it became the dominant project-management software for the PC universe.
We discuss a framework for categorizing stakeholders. We also recommend different communication methods for each type of stakeholder to save you time and effort
Your Guide to the Main Stages of Tech Startup Development
Felix is a Product Manager at Microsoft in the Azure cloud services organization. He’s got a very cool background: he’s started his own company and has gone to business school amongst a lot of other things. I had the chance to ask him some questions about his job.
Simple app to manage your online subscriptions in one place.
Product Manager as a function or practice is fairly old now. It has been around since 1931 (well at least in theory). It originated from a memo written by Neil McElroy, an Advertising Manager at Proctor and Gamble. He wrote this memo to the Executive Team of P&G suggesting the need of a “brand man”, a person solely responsible for the product and not the business.
3 big startup opportunities for your next venture.
Let me preface this by saying I’m a big believer in the bias for action principle popularised by Amazon. I’ve used it as a guideline whenever I didn’t have enough data to make an informed decision.
The state of affairs
Disclaimer: All opinions are my own
Top Chrome extensions for Product Managers – 2021
Best practices and things I’ve learned along the way.
This article is Part 2 of the ongoing series From Zero to Product Manager. A set of articles that help you transition to a Product Management role. In this post, I provide four essential steps to transition to a PM role
Every battle is won before it is fought. ~ Sun Tzu
PMs are ideally placed to create a workplace culture around preventing and responding to technical debt. Here are 7 actionable strategies to help PMs.
Build your products based on the testimonials you want to get from your customers
Product management has seen a lot of takers in the last few years. This field is so varied and versatile that putting bounds to it is a daunting task. Nevertheless, based on my experience and knowledge gained from the circles of product community; I have listed down different fundamental elements of product management.
A Product Manager and a Software Engineer walk into a bar.
Since the rise of the Agile Era, putting the user in the center of product definition process became the standard for most companies. User stories are one of the basic tools that help us keep the user in mind while defining the product and its features.
The Unavoidable Essence of a Product Manager Role: How to succeed as a Change Manager through the power of Narratives.
As soon as you have a new product idea that you think is worth pursuing you need to workout whether the problem you plan to solve is worth solving. Early Customer Interviews are one of the best and fastest first steps to figuring out whether your new idea will succeed.
A list of the most important API metrics every API product manager and engineer should know, especially when you are looking into API analytics and reporting.
In an ideal world, the goal of any business starting up is to make money. In most cases, the profitability of a product is closely tied to how you as a product manager choose to price your product. Apart from building a product that provides real value to its customers, profitable monetization is the second most important aspect of running a successful business.
When Google Wave previewed at the 2009 I/O conference, it was a tool like no other. Not only was it the first unified workspace and collaboration platform before the remote-work boom happened, but it also tried to solve many of the same problems we’re facing today.
I did a survey this summer: I asked the founders what they want help with for their startup. I created a long list of options including sales, metrics, marketing, and product development.
A step by step decision making process to help you choose the best option
The purpose of this article to share my process and journey launching Lund Yoga Community — Sweden’s first sustainable donation-based yoga studio.
In this 2021 venture report, I break down 3 startup ideas or monetization opportunities, starting with private wealth management and family offices.
How Amazonian thinking and communication tools are turning me into a remote work optimist.
Well-written multitier applications consist of multiple layers. The most widespread three-tier architecture divides our code into a presentation, business and data access tiers. Like it or not, but the business layer is where we, developers, spend the most time on a daily basis. This is the place where all processes and decisions our application depends on take place. Therefore, requirements for the business layer change more often than in any other layer. What hurts us, developers, most is that with every change, even the smallest ones, we need to recompile and rebuild our app. It usually takes a piece of the valuable time that we could use for more interesting things. What if we could move a business logic out of our code and let non-technician people change it?
Learn how you can expeditiously and economically test startup ideas through prototyping. Explore different tools for prototyping your product.
I no longer assume I know what someone actually does when they say they are a Product Manager. This year, I had a chance to have over 40 or so 1:1s with folks from outside of work in different stages of their product management journey. No two roles were the same. I distilled our conversations into one picture in an attempt to put a unifying model to the various flavors of product management discipline out there.
This blog examines the top players in the Hyperconverged Infrastructure software market for 2022, key trends in the market, and investigates their impact.
Credits: Thanks to our sponsor Amazon, the Advancing Women in Product Team: Keshav Attrey, Reeba Monachan Attrey, Kanika Kapoor, Alok Gupta, Jackie Yen, our AWIP volunteers and our panelists.
This blog post should not be considered authoritative in any way. It simply an imperfect attempt to highlight some guiding principles. I am convinced these guiding principles could be useful for you, your dear-ones and your team.
Abhor online project management tools? They are an unrelenting aspect of remote work. Meet Slack, Asana, and WhatsApp, the three horsemen of the WFHpocalypse.
Configuration of production and development settings in Django. Can we read from different databases? What about getting notifications on view exceptions?
Product managers have a dangerous role because of one oft-missed truth: Decisions about what to build are far more costly than most teams realize.
Clayton Christensen is one of the greatest business minds of our time. His recent passing caused me to reflect on all I learned from him. His life was dedicated to his family, his faith, and the theories he taught. He personified servant leadership.
Hey, everyone! We, the Indie Hackers SPB Community, organized a one-week Bootcamp: in our free time, we built a product from scratch and launched it on Product Hunt. We got the #3 Product of the Day badge and over 30 installs of our app in the Slack Workspaces. Now, I want to share our experience. At the end of this article, I will share our Notion checklist, that we found extremely helpful for the launch preparation :)
What are the key leadership qualities that inspire teams to build amazing products?
What is Agile Data-Driven?
As a product builder, I built micro tools to solve my own problems. For example: article tool, event app, meal box app, finance tracker, SaaS tracker, and habit tracker.
By far, the top reason startups fail is the lack of market need (42% of the cases). Many startups are founded based on unique technologies, or on problems that are interesting to solve, but don’t necessarily answer a real market need. Understanding what market you are serving, and the problem you are addressing is key. The basis for that is early, continuous feedback from the right people who fit the early adopter profile.
Product information management (PIM) software is necessary for eCommerce businesses to manage their customer-facing product strategy.
Developers with a strong understanding of company strategy rise faster, despite the misconception that engineers should only focus on technical details.
In 2004, I was eager for a challenge. I embarked on an adventure of completing a Computer Science Bachelors degree. Fast forward to today and the adventure continues. I’ve been building products for 12 years for a variety of industries from finance to ecommerce, retail, real estate, hospitality and more.
This week Product School Slack's community members discussed issues regarding technical debt when it comes to prioritization. Check it out!
Here's how I stumbled upon an idea and turned it into a SaaS start-up with 10 customers and over 4000 users, and everything I've learnt along the way.
There was no room for assumptions and different expectations.
To become a product manager, I had to first ascertain what transferrable skills I had that would be relevant in product management and was ready to develop new ones that I did not yet have.
In this post, I'll try to share my experience on learning product manager’s job as a software engineer. What the job is like, what’s involved, as an introvert can you be a become a product manager, and many other questions you might have. I am a technical co-founder of a product management app called Shipit and needed to put myself into the role of product manager to learn the intricacies of the job.
The insurance industry is a huge market. In the United States, in 2019, the volume of paid insurance premiums amounted to a trillion dollars. However, despite such volumes, the industry is experiencing great difficulties, because of which insurance companies are losing more than $100 billion every year.
Every software company has some amount of technical debt, which is additional development work created in the long-term by taking a shortcut in the short-term to get code out the door. Technical debt can take the form of poor design decisions, much-needed refactorings, technology upgrades, and outstanding bugs.
A development method to bring value quickly while not slowing down the pace of software releases.
How to build a start-up or product MVP without coding
Product teams have a lot of great practices that data teams would benefit from adopting. Namely: user-centricity and proactivity.
I occasionally (and usually accidentally) find myself in a discussion about whether or not every story should be a shippable increment of work. Recently, I got involved (deliberately) in the discussion when I was invited to answer the question, “...should a user story correspond to a potentially shippable product increment?” on Quora.
Deciding on what to build inhouse vs. buy off the shelf requires product prioritization. Build a capability assessment to improve your product strategy.
Read the backstory behind Timoté Geimer's career and the growth of dualoop, a product management consulting firm.
How can teams perform at their full potential?
Learn how to do project estimation that removes deadlines and avoids stress from a successful software engineering leader.
Up until pretty recently my company’s tech team managed its projects through a Kanban-board. In practice this entailed that we’d come up with a product roadmap for the 12 months ahead and would start working on this from top to bottom, moving tickets through the usual swimming lanes as we went.
A common debate in the Agile community is how important or not Standups are, and what their structure should be.
Three months ago I decided to immerse myself in the rapidly growing world of no-code development. This is what I’ve learned.
What to look for when hiring Product Managers. What Product Managers can do to stand out from the crowd.
Every conversation I have with CTOs, Engineering Managers, and Tech Leaders eventually gets to the “Which Metrics Should We Measure?” discussion.
10 Important Psychology lessons from Mom and Pop Stores
Note: This article is part of my toolkit newsletters↗️ where I share resources about building things. Join me :)
The global product development services industry was close to $8 billion in 2020.
This is what my friend Sanjeev asked me yesterday:
The word “prioritize” has kept product managers awake at night since the time pigeons carried messages and horses pulled carts.
What becoming a Product Manager is really like and how you can adjust your expectations to survive your first days, according to the unfiltered view of 5 new Product Managers
There is always that new product manager who is wondering what the next 3 months will look like. The successes, learnings, adaptations, expectations, and the list goes on and on.
Here's everything I wish I knew five years ago when a startup entrusted all of their internal tooling to me (a startup co-founder who had only built consumer products). To make this article actionable, you can start measuring the success of platform products using the checklist at the end of the post.
Some of us in product take it for granted that a product-led approach is the way to operate. However, all too often our stakeholders – sales, marketing, our boss’s boss, even our own team – may need some convincing.
There is an abundance of great advice offered to new/aspiring Product Managers. There is also some easy to spot bad advice doing the rounds. The most dangerous type, however, is advice that looks good at the surface but is actually bad. I like to call such advice as, ‘terrible advice’.
After an eleven year run of economic growth, the events of the past three months have triggered a period of monumental uncertainty, simultaneously forcing paralysis in businesses across the globe.
Product Manager responsibilities can vary depending on the company size, industry, and location. On 10/16, our NYC chapter launch focused on exploring the unique qualities that define Product Management in Silicon Valley and New York. Despite heavy rain and the accompanying subway delays, we had a good showing with highly engaged attendees for our discussion on Contrasting PM Disciplines Between Coasts with a distinguished panel of successful women in product who were selected for their experience in operating across both coasts. The panelists were:
This Slogging thread by Yuvraj Malik, Akshay M. Bharadwaj, Will Fang, Jiani wei, Evan Leong and Ansley Miller occurred in product-school's official #06_product_tools channel, and has been edited for readability.
Startup interview with Prashant, founder and CEO Zeda.io.
You find yourself fully committed to solving a problem, you think if I just do x then it's smooth sailings and it'll all be done. A couple hours pass and you've nailed x, but actually y and z seem pretty challenging, and now you have to fix x in order to make y and z as slick as possible.
Developing and releasing open-source solutions is a common practice that has been adopted by companies like Red Hat, Facebook, Google, and Amazon. IT companies that make products available as open-source software have become a sensation in the investment environment. Confluent, Neo4j, HashiCorp, and GitLab are just a few examples of companies that have managed to attract large investments.
Developer relations is a growing practice of engaging with external developers. In simple words, the job of a DevRel team is to make sure that developers working with the software or API are happy, which positively affects the image of the platform and leads to its popularity.
Sharing my observation from watching Ford Vs Ferrari, how a Ford sports car team wins a 24 hours long car race and their journey to build solid product.
In this article, we’ll dive deep into what you should do and shouldn’t when it comes to user segmentation.
One of the most harmful behaviors I’ve observed in ineffective leadership is a tendency to add chaos when one enters a room. Chaos comes in many flavors: A decision was reached about an important architecture question weeks ago, but someone suddenly insists that you revisit the project’s fundamental goals at the 11th hour. An executive insists that their project is most important, and pushes it onto the roadmap. Or maybe you leave a productive meeting without concrete next steps, and are right back where you started in a week.
We often get the itch of wanting to turn it into a functional app right away. But diving into development without the so-called discovery phase might be fatal.
Explore the concept of the Bullshit job made popular by David Graeber – see how it applies to Product Management.
How many people will click to check out the website shouldn't matter when you are trying to validate a product.
An incident postmortem is a meeting that brings together all of the people that were directly or indirectly involved in a project to discuss and document it.
Excellent problem-solving skill is very essential for a Product Manager, because in the real day to day as a Product Manager will face a lot of complex problems that require deeply thinking for finding the root cause of problems, not only user’s problems but also internal problems such as slow development process, increase growth rate, increase retention rate, etc.
If this was 40 years ago and you were doing a cross-country road trip from the American east coast to the west coast, you'ld probably have a roadmap. You'ld be updating it every few days depending on the weather and the news you picked up along the way. You might have stayed a night longer in a beautiful town and might have decided to skip another.
Product, Parkour, and Pioneering: how the role of product management varies by stage of company
A sentiment analysis API can be instrumental in helping you ace business strategy for growth. Check out the guide to sentiment analysis APIs for SaaS Managers
Nothing compares to the value of opening yourself to inspiration by reading what others working in your field have to say. Looking up from your work to learn and stay updated on current trends is immensely important. New ideas don’t just pop into your head during meetings, you need to invest in seeking them out. And yet, taking the time to browse new titles is one of those things that always seems to get pushed to the bottom of the list. In a world of stressing deadlines and constant multitasking, actually sitting down to do “nothing but reading” takes some special effort.
To succeed at sales, you need to know the value of your product.
Resources that can help you transition into your new role as a Product Manager or UI/UX Designer.
A business's inventory is one of its most important and valuable assets. In this article, you will explore six ways to improve inventory management.
Many people believe that AI might eventually take over our jobs. But is this really true? Can AI do everything as well as humans can?
“Difficulty is what wakes up the genius” has become my mantra of 2020 (thanks Nassim Taleb). If that's true then what follows should be pure gold: a collection of my best ideas for a challenging year.
5 tips on how to run result-focused design sprints from a designer at Meta & Google. Take your design sprints to another level.
Over the past 7 years in Product, I’ve worked with a lot of Product Managers. Some were great at being unreasonable, many were extreme generalists, and most were great at saying no.
It's been over 6 months since I joined KritiLabs. The learning that I have had been very steep and intense, considering its a career shift for me from a services based pre-sales to a product based pre-sales and product management.
In “Alice in Wonderland” we are invited to escape reality by tumbling into a whimsical world of nonsense. I found in this story a good analogy for PMs.
In our previous blog post, we wrote about Agile, a philosophy for managing projects and teams. In that text, we mentioned Agile methods, one of them being Scrum.
The software development market is gigantic and has a lot to offer us
Raji Arasu is the visionary mind and engineering leader that occupies the position of SVP of Engineering at Intuit, making her one of the few female leaders at a major technology company. She is aware of this thing and supports women leaders in technology both within the company and across the industry.
In October 2019 with the mentorship of a dear friend, I made the decision to become a Product Manager starting with a PM certification course and the knowledge that I would have to start my career afresh and work my way up from the lowest rank on the totem. This is what I’ve done. I transitioned from my usual Executive Assistant role which was great but not very challenging creatively.
Entering your first towards an MVP (minimum viable product) can cause confusion if you focus on outcomes as planned. Plan to learn with the trip instead.
In most new products today, the technological risk is minuscule in comparison with the risk of not achieving product-market fit.
When do people report bugs? You probably never asked yourself that question, which was one of the reasons we wanted to answer it. The second reason was that we had the right type of data available, since our tool helps teams report and fix bugs. Long story short, we decided to learn more about the way software development teams approach the bug reporting process. For that exercise we've taken a random sample of 3000 bug recordings uploaded to our database in the last 2 months. Here's what we found.
The quality and relevance of results that can be derived from ChatGPT is highly dependent on the quality and contextual mapping of prompts or requests.
How to tell between important and unimportant and don’t get lost in data smog.
Why is a Minimum Viable Product Important for Software Development Projects? Discover in this article!
From being transparent, validating assumptions and co-creating with users, here are some easy-to-execute ways to stay user-focused as a Product Manager.
Working as a product manager at a IOT startup, I realised that the IOT Product Management is a bit different from the Product Management of a typical Software / SaaS product. To equip myself better, I started scouting for product management books from a hardware / IOT standpoint. In that process came across this amazing book called Prototype to Products by Alan Cohen. This book clearly articulates what goes into IOT / hardware Product Management and what needs to be done additionally.
A simple analyses of Pocket app using the infamous Hook Framework
Documenting tech products is a key part of making a project sustainable in the long term. Despite that, properly documenting them is incredibly difficult.
Use weekly project plans to improve your agile team's ability to plan and reason about the future.
I used to think mission statements were laughably gratuitous and "frou-frou". Over time I realized a good mantra can save your company.
While product management enjoys unquestioned support in the world’s most successful tech companies, other organisations that could substantially benefit from product management are still yet to adopt and embrace the discipline. So, I want to go through why you need product management in your tech or digital organisation.
Notion is an All-In-One workspace. Notion’s platform allows you to create task-oriented lists and projects, wikis, databases, lightweight CRM’s, tables & more!
I stumbled on the topic of accessibility and inclusion while learning user experience (UX) design from MOOCs. At first, I thought it's a reasonably familiar topic but I couldn't have been more wrong.
Building a successful search takes more than technical smarts, but if done right is one of the most rewarding products you could work on.
In this article we will talk about using Gantt charts for Project Management. How this tool functions, and outlines its main benefits and drawbacks.
Engineers often complain about product strategy, but this post goes through why it is so hard and how to avoid common pitfalls.
One of the things, I had decided, was that during the lockdown I would sharpen my skills around Product Management. For this, I have been religiously attending many webinars and doing some online courses. One of the courses that hit the chord was this course
As companies across the world continue to take precautions against COVID-19, many teams find themselves "suddenly remote" and adjusting to a new set of challenges on top of their daily work. At Exponent, we've been operating as a remote team for most of the past year, with engineers, designers, and PMs spread across several time zones—not to mention thousands of users around the world who are part of our Slack community and Interview Practice forum.
a project's minimum person is the project's maximum
Here are a few tools that help make your Google Calendar work a little harder for you! These tools use AI tech to enhance the value you get from your Calendar.
Recognizing that you have technical debt is easy. And if you don’t recognize it already, one of your engineers will likely tell you:)
Without organization, backlogs get messy quickly, and issues can’t be prioritized.
In the last post we looked at what strategy is and the false contradiction between planning for strategy and letting your product emerge through rapid experimentation and fast feedback loops, which often combine and compound in unforeseen ways. We talked at how writing it down can help you clarify your future thinking and crystallize your product definition and the strategy that underlies it.
What BuyCoins can do better: My UX analysis of BuyCoins, a Nigerian cryptocurrency exchange platform
The worst thing we can do in Sprint Planning is to initiate it with the question, “How many tasks can we fit in this Sprint?”
If you decide to outsource the development of the project, you must understand the specifics of this format of cooperation with the agency. You cannot fully control the “inner kitchen” of the project creation, will it be a startup or software for a large enterprise. But this is not necessary, as experienced agencies ensure the transparency and continuity of all work processes. They maintain constant communication with the client and resolve issues as they become available.
A guide on how to Improve your Product Development Cycle using clever applications of ML and AI.
Sundar Annamalai and Vinod Pachipulusu about starting Loop as a virtual restaurant platform to help restaurants with their business.
mParticle & HackerNoon are excited to host a Growth Marketing Writing Contest. Here’s your chance to win money from a whopping $12,000 prize pool!
Amazon's Working Backwards process is well documented across the internet. But why don't more companies use this for their innovation?
In this post, we study the Survivorship bias — the danger to concentrate your data analysis solely on existing power users
I have read multiple definitions for Lead Time and Cycle Time over the last years. Recently, I shared why I prefer using the first over the later.
Try our problem statement guide to ease team collaboration & prioritization process. Develop a distinct workflow and bring order. Get synched and result-driven. Make your team understand what they do and why.
I am grateful to you for reading my article. Through my trials, I have found that it is not enough to know what to do - we must act on that knowledge to have what we want.
Google is generally at innovation’s forefront, and a large number of its items and administrations have become industry pioneers. Be that as it may, not all things google conjures up goes to gold. The tech goliath has created a couple of clunkers, yet Google doesn’t stop for a second to cut its misfortunes. Here’s a voyage through the Google Graveyard, with a glance at certain items and administrations Google has executed off as the years progressed.
Software quality metrics are essential tools in ensuring a product provides the best experience to its users. Here are some tips for (not only) data scientists.
A resume is a brief which tells about you before the interviewer gets to meet you in person. So it should be interesting & informative enough.
While every startup has their journey, SaaS application designing and development has their SDLC. Here's what you need to learn about them.
Natasha from hackernoon.com asks Product Strategist Dani Laity to unpack the sustainable tech product strategies and monetization models powering Aurora Sustainability—2020 Noonie Nominee in for Best Use of Tech for Good in hackernoon.com’s annual internet awards! 🚀
Product positioning is one of the most discussed topics in product marketing, and it could either make or mar the performance of any product that you developed.
Today, there are so many ways to learn how to be a better product manager. There are books, courses and articles which will teach you the various skills and techniques you need to know. But in this article, I don't want to talk about these. Instead, I want to share some ideas from other disciplines, like economics, psychology and manufacturing that changed the way I think and made me a better product manager. I hope they spark interest and do the same for you!
About a month ago, I started working on Unfluence! It was going to be the perfect side project. In fact, Here is a list of things why it was going to be a perfect side project.
Since 2018 I've been involved in building close to a dozen products. Most of them I've shut down, some of them I've sold to others – and some are still alive! I credit a lot to this time – I believe these products are a major factor in my personal and professional development.
Mani Kumar, co-founder of The Mind Clan, has been using n8n for both personal and professional purposes. He has been advocating about process automation and how it can bring about a lot of benefits for individuals and companies. We talked to him to learn more about his experience with workflow automation and why he decided to use n8n.
We are excited to announce the availability of Courier’s newest provider, Courier Push! We have released Inbox and Toast; two open-source React components
Entrepreneurship is getting popular with every passing day, leading to an increase in rising startups. But how many have tasted success?
Learn how B2B and SaaS product managers solve business users problems by building features for enterprise solutions
Early stages of product development are one of the most exciting times to be a part of the company as a product manager. One of the most important factors that drive the growth and success of the product is how quickly it acquires a large and loyal base of customers. You want these customers to use your product as frequently as possible with minimum friction.
You need to go from your house to the Airport. Do you take a Limo or a bike? Of course a Limo? The road is bad and the traffic worse... A Limo is not always the right choice.
Problem-solving question is the most frequent and recurring question asked PM interview. Here's a way on how shall one approach it.
By now, my assumption is that you have given your pivot into product management, some thought, per-chance even simulated your foray end to end. No surprises. I was you, in February 2010, with countless sleepless nights digging hundreds of product management blogs and resources. Why Product Management? Was I aware it was called product management?
I quit my job. I'm now unemployed. It feels great to finally be able to write this blog post.
Have you ever gotten to the end of your day and while you've completed tasks, you don't feel you accomplished what you set out to do? Are you're working hard at a list of tasks that you're trying to finish but you're not able to give 100%? Do you have no idea where time has gone and you have nothing to showcase your work? Do you procrastinate? Do you lose time in your day scrolling social media feeds, your inbox or YouTube? There may be a solution that could help you. The Pomodoro Technique and it could transform your life.
Learn to build a B2B online marketplace startup without code
Product management is more of an art than a science, and its unique deliverables depend largely on the personality of the product manager.
What’s stopping you?
This week Product School Slack's community members uncovered ways to properly plan product sprints.
The bread and butter of knowledge work is figuring out what needs to be done, in what order, and what can be cut.
How to have a successful product management internship
Vindhya C won 2019's coveted Noonie Award for Product Manager of the Year. Nominations for the 2020 Award for Product Manager of the Year are OPEN UNTIL 12 AUGUST AT NOON! Nominate someone you admire for a Hacker Noon Tech Award and make a PM's day today!
Products are developed, provided, and enhanced by people, and effectively leading them is crucial to achieve product success. But leading stakeholders and development teams requires overcoming six product leadership challenges that range from lacking transactional power to guiding self-organising teams. The description of the challenges below is an extract from my new book How to Lead in Product Management.
This is a continuation of a series on bring an app to life, from nothing to something. Read Part 1 here.
As a full-stack developer who primarily uses React and .NET, I have traditionally shied away from platform-specific integrations. Throughout my career, I have heard of Salesforce and "Salesforce Developers" (and I have also heard that Salesforce Developers were well-compensated), but otherwise, these terms never provoked my interest. After all, why would I want to lock myself into learning skills and abilities which only allowed me to work with one specific application?
DevOps is a deployment process that helps automate a lot of processes that used to take a team hours to days to get through. When you are trying to get that process going, you need to know that everyone is on-board or else it won't work. Switching from Waterfall deployments to DevOps is a huge organizational change.
As all Spider-Man comic book fans know, with great power comes great responsibility, and being a great manager isn't just about being good at telling people what to do. It turns out that effective engineering managers aren't mind-bending wizards — they're just good at a few things. Here's a few of them:
As a product manager, I came across numerous situations where I had to put myself into the shoes of customers as well as stakeholders. This is a necessary step to get to know the requirements from both sides and integrate these requirements into a product. That being said, one could argue that the product is basically an intermediary between the stakeholders and customers. Well, not literally stakeholders but their businesses. That made me think of an approach where each product could be built as a multi-sided platform, which connects two groups of participants — the ones that offer a service (stakeholders or business owners) and the others that are looking for the same services (customers or other businesses).
Anyone who has ever released software to customers before I’m sure has suffered from the stress and anxiety it can cause when you’re hoping and praying everything will work just as it did during testing once it’s in production.
A product team is the backbone of any company with a digital offering. They're responsible for constructing goods or a service that not only provides value to users but is also a reflection of the organization they work for. Product teams spin many plates at once, spanning duties from product management, product marketing, user experience, and product analytics. In the below article, we talk through the 4 characteristics that make up a high-performing product team.
Lessons in Information Asymmetry
When I first moved to San Francisco, I didn’t have a car. Who needs a car in San Francisco? And the parking is like $350 per month so that is a hard no.
Measuring success is an integral part of any company, without which we cannot operate a product in any way or form. Without measuring success, the whole product vision would simply be based on some deluded platform of presumptions and intuitions which may or may not be correct. However, the question is what constitutes as ‘success’ and what should be measured in calculating how close or far we are to this success?
It could be tricky to prioritise hundreds of user stories in spreadsheet or Jira, you need to know which of them are the highest value features are so that you can build them next. An advanced technique to organise stories is more preferred than a messy product backlog. This is how a user story map can help in a simple way to tell story and break it down into parts.
How do you track your Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) in product management? Read these suggested solutions from experienced product managers.
Sunil Tej Gorantla is a product expert, growth hacker, and writer. He believes in solving for what people need and making data-driven decisions.
We see hard-working product teams struggling all the time, even under the best of conditions. Often, it’s not due to a deficiency or lack of skill within the team. Rather, the team has fallen into one—or more—of the most common dysfunctions in product management.
Defining Product Goals and Metrics for Product Managers. Solving Product Execution Problems and Cases for PM interviews.
Scrum Alliance, scrum.org, and ICAgile are some of the best Scrum certification providers in the market. Certifications from a reputable source provide insight.
The purpose of a user story is to describe the desired functionality of a specific part of the software.
How do the big tech companies and unicorn startups succeed in agile product development while maintaining code quality.
When your team is building a software product, the majority of the work that they do is invisible. As a manager, you have to rely on in-person cues for blocked work or frustrated engineers. When they move to a remote workflow—your team also becomes invisible, and all those critical signals are dropped.
In-person, you might notice:
Product marketing function varies significantly from company to company and it sometimes even means different things at the same organization.
Becoming a manager is usually one of the biggest challenges of an engineer’s career. We are usually used to algorithms and state machines, which are predictable and have specific outputs depending on the input.
Many development teams suffer from misunderstanding of business requirements. User Story turns out a round table for discussions over future achievements.
As a product manager/owner of a product, a service or a feature, when do you get to know something went wrong?
The past few months of COVID-19 has all but certainly put the nail in the coffin for WeWork. In addition to the stress placed on the U.S.
The three keys outlined in this article will help product managers in agency settings implement Agile more effectively.
This article is Part 3 of the ongoing series From Zero to Product Manager. A set of articles that help you transition to a Product Management role. In this post, I provide tips to look for jobs and prepare for your interview.
Many tech businesses rely on a mix of process and platitudes to define how they work. Instead, they should focus on the tactics that inform their processes.
Building a SaaS startup
Client-oriented approach tips that help to build smooth and productive communication with clients.
Product Diversification is crucial for growth in the e-commerce market and to expand in the right direction.
Your project may contain tasks that depend on each other. Sometimes a task cannot start until its dependent (predecessor) task finishes, or maybe the task can start when its dependent task starts as well. As you manage tasks with these more complex dependency types (FS, SF, SS, FF), you may find more specialized software or SaaS tool to help you plan and visualize these tasks.
My reflection notes, processes, and frameworks — how I rapidly test new ideas, generate paying customers, and optimize daily performance.
Having trouble hitting deadlines and staying focused? Well, have no fear! This article will introduce four productivity hacks that almost anyone can implement immediately and see fast results.
As a founder with a developer background, I was frequently asked for recommendations of outsourced tech teams. A long time ago I co-founded a Ukrainian software house, before handing business to my partner in 2016.
Recently we held a meetup where Dashly and other IT companies talked internal researches. We invited Alisa Velminskaya, user researcher at Skyeng, who told us about how Skyeng’s research team manages to combine user research and data analysis. She also shared some research organizing experience. Other representatives who joined her to talk about their companies’ research methods were Ekaterina Syuma, product designer at Miro, and Maxim Golovkin, head of web & mobile development at ER-Telecom. The one shooting questions at them was Dmitrii Sergeev, the CEO & founder of Dashly.
Can software project estimation be as realistic as possible? This article will walk you through how we, at UpsilonIT, approach the estimating process. We will also share some hands-on techniques and useful tips on making it more accurate and robust.
Product Management Case Study approach by using feature prioritization techniques. A brief introduction to the Product Management field.
A non-technical explanation of Docker containers, Kubernetes, and clusters.
We’ve developed an API-as-Product Assessment Framework that we’re using to assess public APIs. We’re sharing this framework because you will likely find it to be a useful tool for understanding your own API as a product or set of products.
Software development takes time and effort and requires patience, but if it’s taking too long it can hurt the business. That’s why it’s important to always consider what you can do to improve your software development productivity.
Creating the Stances of the Product Owner
P value is the probability that the results we are seeing are real and not by random chance. P-Hacking is a term used to describe the scientific manipulation of data to get the desired P value. All of us do this with our experiments, consciously or not.
There is an inherent conflict between the product leader and the CEO, which can often be summarized into one question: who has the final say. To start resolving
When global circumstances required our team to go completely remote, we knew things would be tough. Team members wouldn’t just be working from home; they’d be working from home during a time of intense fear and uncertainty, with a myriad of new concerns and distractions. We expected that engineering activity would decline as a result, and we were understanding — as our VP of Engineering, Ale Paredes, explained during a panel on working remotely through the crisis, “We're not trying to behave as if it's business as usual, because it's not business as usual.”
But when Ale checked the team’s productivity metrics in Velocity, our engineering analytics platform, she was surprised by what she found. After we made the switch to a distributed workflow, many engineers actually started working more. Still, despite logging more time in the codebase, they were getting less done.
To find out why the team wasn’t making progress, Ale dug deeper into the data. Not only did she find answers, she used that information to develop better ways to support the team.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”- Margaret Mead
Enterprise software companies sell very differently today than just a decade ago. Previously, most software was shrink-wrapped, required a lot of effort to distribute and implement, and was sold to an executive who would have to deploy it throughout their department or organization. The buying process involved a long sales cycle and often included pilots, cost-benefit analyses, procurement, and legal reviews.
Would you recommend Jira Align as a tool for product managers? Experienced product managers discuss the Jira onboarding process and alternatives.
If you are constructing a building, a blueprint of the building is mandatory before laying the foundation. It forms the basis for estimating the resources required, the number of construction workers, the time it will take to complete the construction and a direction that will guide the civil engineers. The same methodology also applies to digital products.
My generation has seen a world much less forgiving. We grew up understanding the fundamentals of climate change, and saw rising sea levels and record setting temperatures all over the world.
Yes, we've finally reached a point where design is such a huge piece of a product's creation and maintenance that a whole paraphernalia of software will definitely be an essential asset to your projects. Each program will fill different needs and facilitate the best and most efficient work deliveries, be it structure, visual design, illustrations, interactions or animations.
Why do we so often ask teams to estimate in detail how much effort is required to build a product, and to that upfront? There’s evidence that this lead us to output-oriented thinking, premature optimization, bloat and generally a commitment to suboptimal solutions that are designed with too many assumptions and a lack of clarity on the problem space.
This article describes a model for writing engaging user stories that can be used to assist with team productivity, product quality, and user experience goals.
How to be a product leader: the difference between product leadership and product management
How many times have you felt that it would have been better to contemplate the project requirements? How many times did you feel like including that “one” particular feature/function could have saved it from failure? Hold on to the thought right there! Do you think a System Requirements Specification could have played a pivotal role in success?