If I had a penny for every time I brought in a new group of engineers to work on a project, and had to debate with engineers, on the merits of using a proper project management tool, beyond Trello or GitHub issues. As a program or project manager, you want to be able to track […]
Something many PMBOK practitioners are familiar with already, but always worth honing in on, is the project or program ritual of formalizing a project charter. A project charter is the pinnacle of any project, it is the justification and mandate for kicking off a project. Most commonly prepared at the start of a project by […]
Most practitioners associate the tenets of the agile manifesto as the guiding principles in executing their scrum agendas. In this article, With the premise of Scrum optimized on empirical process control, I wanted to spend some time looking into the three pillars of Scrum theory: transparency, inspection and adaption and provide some annotation on what they really mean, and why these pillars should be the foundations of your practice.
Something as a practicing program manager I tend to always use as tenets when guiding teams, is relying on the spiritual bible of contemporary project management, and that’s the Agile Manifesto. Products of the Agile Alliance, the premise of the Manifesto is to simplify the practice of project management through a lightweight framework to build software expeditiously with bias for customer validation over processes and documentation and red tape.
The two drivers behind the manifesto are iterative and incremental development, over pre-medicated and over planning, and creating higher quality software in shorter time, or more concisely, build more with less.
Overwhelmingly, tech companies have transitioned their sprint iterations from co-location to having teams work remotely, from home. The Covid-19 pandemic has forced teams to change how they interact with each other, perform agile rituals and deliver products.
One thing that is missing, is osmotic communications, learning through accidentally overhearing.
A great bar-raiser for a user story as a product manager, is to leverage a well-known industry mnemonic, called INVEST. Any user story that fails to meet that criteria should definitely be a candidate for a re-write. So what is INVEST? “The INVEST acronym applies to having superior quality in the actual product backlog and […]
Product Managers are always asked upon to justify their product decisions, why invest company resources in a roadmap. In order to back your decisions, you need to be able to prove that it is indeed what the market is asking for, and you are addressing a need. As a product manager myself, I have continually started to rely on a framework that I have become to grow fonder of, and that is Experiment-Driven Product Development, or XDPD for short.
As a product manager, it is important that you know who your customer is, and this holds especially true when product developing in an enterprise setting. Take Apple for example, they build beautiful products that factor extreme attention to detail to produce a User Experience (UX) language that makes it intuitive to use and interact with.
One of the notable concepts to emerge from Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco this year, has been the notion of differential privacy. As Wired puts it Differential Privacy is the “…statistical science of trying to learn as much as possible about a group while learning as little as possible about any individual in it.”
The minimum viable product (MVP) is a powerful concept that allows you to test your ideas. It is not to be confused with the minimal marketable product (MMP), the product with the smallest feature set that still addresses the user needs and creates the right user experience. The MVP helps you acquire the relevant knowledge and address key risks; the MMP reduces time-to-market and enables you to launch your product faster. This post discusses both concepts, and it shows how you can use the minimum viable product to create a minimal marketable one.
