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Articles on Working with Development

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Page A House With No Front Door In my effort to build products with limited resources, I often spend time justifying the need for features. By Saeed Khan
Page A Model for Metrics-Driven Feature Prioritization Learn the technique that relies on statistically-valid samples of broad-based customer data to understand customer needs and prioritize product enhancements. By...
Page Add “Quick Hits” and (Finally) Address Those Priority 3 Enhancements Woe to the minor enhancement request that gets tagged as a dreaded Priority 3 or nice-to-have feature during the prioritization phase of a project. All too ofte...
Page Agile Market Requirements Product managers write horrid requirements that are littered with buzzwords, ambivalent language, and non-specific performance parameters. They read like somewh...
Page Building a Better Beta Delivering a successful beta program can be one of the hardest things to do as a product manager. By Saeed Khan.
Page Buyer and User Personas How to develop clarity about the ideal buyer and user. By Steve Johnson.
Page Change is Pulling Us into the Cloud Product Management must communicate with and understand the development team. In an Agile world, they must maintain a sequentially prioritized requirements list...
Page Clean, Cutting-Edge UI Design Cuts McAfee's Support Calls by 90% With 20,000 downloads of ProtectionPilot over a 10-week time span, McAfee received only 170 calls to support lines. Here are 23 detailed tips gleaned from McAfe...
Page Cost of Language Translation What is the best way to handle the costs and schedules for language translations? Should it be the responsibility of the Country Manager or Corporate Developmen...
Page Data driven design “My mom should be able to use it” translates into making an easy interface while “I want absolute control over the placement of items in my document” re...
Page Defects or Features Next Should we fix defects or add new features? Should we deliver on the promises we've already made to our customers, or should we make new promises to get new cust...
Page Development Milestones I’m trying to introduce process around the development and launch of our products. The term “Gating” is one that many people are familiar with but it see...
Page Disruptive Customer Demands When and why customers make disruptive requests, how to deal with them and how minimize their disruptive impact. By Daniel Shefer
Page Does Agile Have to Be Acrimonious? Avoiding Engineering vs. Product Management disagreements in an Agile world. By Stacey Weber.
Page Easy to Use for Whom: Defining the Customer and User Experience for Enterprise Software Enterprise software is only easy to use if the customer and user think it is easy to use. By Sean Van Tyne.
Page Enabling Cross-Functional Teams: A Leadership Role for Product Managers A cross-functional team helps communicate more broadly, gain alignment more easily, and builds better products. And as an added benefit, the team helps product ...
Page End of Life: Retiring a Product Outdated software can turn into a monster. How do you discontinue a product that is no longer profitable? And how do you know that it's time? By Steve Johnson.
Page Everyone needs to know what we do here Technology marketing and product management requires domain expertise. People who tell you otherwise probably aren't very effective in working with technical pr...
Page Faster! Gaining Product Momentum One of the top tasks of a product manager is to make the product gain momentum. Read on for tips about how to build momentum to catch up with competitors and ev...
Page Feature Police: Following Through On Requirements how Product Managers can play a vital role as the Requirements Police, making sure that important requirements are not forgotten. By Jacques Murphy
Page Getting Your Priorities Straight: A Twisted Path A major challenge that faces every software product is determining the priority of the oh- so-many suggestions that come to Product Management as requirements f...
Page He Who Owns The Compiler Wins In my seminars I often quote my rule that "he who owns the compiler wins." It's a reminder that product managers lack the political power to make developers do ...
Page Holding Development to Dates How can product management most effectively hold development groups to dates that are promised?
Page How Product Managers Help Development? Product Managers are in the unique position of having dual citizenship, with passports for both Marketing land and Development land. By Jacques Murphy
Page Inability to Get a Product Launch Date in Scrum Environment In our SCRUM environment, It is impossible to have an official Product Launch date that the project team can drive towards and deliver. Does SCRUM prevent us fr...
Page Is Product Management Agile? There’s a lot of talk about Agile Product Management these days, and for obvious reasons. The thinking is that because of Agile software development, Product ...
Page I’m Agile? I’m Agile. I’m Agile! Becoming an Agile Product Manager After 18 months of practicing Agile product management, I am finally feeling more like a yogi rather than a victim of medieval torture. Here are five things I l...
Page Living in an Agile World: the Strategic Role of Product Management when Development goes Agile For years, product management seems to have been defined by what it is not as much as what it is. Developers and engineers often see product managers as technic...
Page Major vs Minor Release We need to redefine our release schedules and would like to know what makes a major and a minor release.
Page Managers as experts Today, people who manage people are now called Directors and people who manage ‘things’ are called Managers. In effect, the term manager can now be equated ...
Page Managing Product Requirements: Where Did All My Customer Insights Go? How does Requirements Management not only help your company deliver more customer-driven products but how does it help you personally work more efficiently. By ...
Page Meeting Promised Development Dates How to commit to specific product release dates and meet them. By Jacques Murphy
Page Missed Delivery Dates - The Trust Factor First, take some comfort in knowing that you are not alone – this happens to many product managers. Second, understand there are ways to avoid it. By Stacey ...
Page More Performance Anxiety: More About Performance Improving product performance so that your software remains competitive. By Jacques Murphy
Page Navigating Pathways to the Future: Product Roadmaps Lead Their Readers in Multiple Directions At a recent Product Strategy Network roundtable, a group of product strategists shared their benefits as well as frustrations with the technique of roadmapping....
Page New Features: Moving Ahead On All Fronts Tips on how to keep making progress on several new features with each software release. By Jacques Murphy
Page Non-Recurring Engineering Non-Recurring Engineering (NRE) is a one time engineering effort by a vendor that is paid for by a customer. What it is, and what it isn't. By Daniel Shefer
Page On Reqs and Specs: The Roles and Behaviors for Effective Product Definition Do you write Requirements or Specifications? Or do you combine them into ReqSpecs? Each has a place but combining them just causes confusion. By Steve Johnson a...
Page Performance Anxiety: Improving Product Performance A user's impression of how fast your product moves from screen to screen, how quickly it calls up lists of records, how seamlessly it performs tasks when you cl...
Page Prioritizing Software Requirements with Kano Analysis The Kano analysis model was developed to identify and contrast essential customer requirements from incremental requirements, and initiate critical thinking. By...
Page Product Management and Agile Building a product is like driving a train: it takes a long time to start and a longer time to stop. And once the train leaves the station, it's very hard to ch...
Page Product Management When Your Team is Global It used to be that managing a software product was simple: customers were close, development took place right down the hall, you could easily eavesdrop on suppo...
Page Product Manager vs Business Analyst How would you define the functional difference between a Product Manager and a Business Analyst (where the PM sits in the business and the BA sits in the De...
Page Product Roadmap to the Promised Land Do you have a Product Roadmap? One can be critical to supplying the inspiring vision that everyone uses to march in the same direction. And this is all the more...
Page Product Roadmaps Just like planning a trip, a roadmap communicates in broad strokes what you plan to do. Explore ways to the most direct route. By Steve Johnson.
Page Pushed And Pulled: Development Vs. Production a discussion of how these two priorities, development and production, push and pull you in two different directions and how to handle them. By Jacques Murphy
Page Re-Write of our Core Product We are trying to tackle a re-write of our core product. The re-write is huge and will be the foundation for the next 5-10 years of our growth and development. T...
Page Reconciling Maintenance And New Releases What you need to consider as you continually strike a balance between development on maintenance releases and on new feature releases. By Jacques Murphy
Page Requirements: Functionality or User Interface First? I was recently promoted to VP Product Management in my organization. I have nearly 9 years tenure with the company in a sales and management capacity, so know o...
Page Requirements: Like Lambs to the Slaughter As your company gears up to start the next software release, a Product Manager reaches the point where carefully crafted requirements are ready to submit to the...
Page Scrum and the Product Owner I have a question about SCRUM as it applies to the Product Owner role. Can the same person who fills the product owner role also fill the Scrum Master role or ...
Page Software Design: Seeing vs. Thinking Good product design can mean the difference between success and failure. By Jacques Murphy
Page Software Development Pitfalls: Requirements How to better understand software requirements - and how to misunderstand them a little less. By Jacques Murphy
Page Software Development Pitfalls: Planning how to better understand the planning of software development -- and how to overcome some common hurdles. By Jacques Murphy
Page Stalled: Getting Development into Gear useful ideas that you can use with the team--from entry level programmers to VPs--to make your product develop and improve faster, and therefore gain ground on ...
Page Technology Assessment: Foundation for Product Strategy Webinar with John Milburn
Page The Business Case for User Oriented Product Development In developing any given technology product, great care is taken to make sure the technology works correctly. Software is constantly debugged, hardware is system...
Page The Host With The Most: Hosting Software Understand the dynamics, the limitations, and the considerations involved in successfully hosting software. By Jacques Murphy
Page The Mythical Product Owner Product Managers must quickly adapt to the Agile methodology, or face becoming sidelined. It is critical to understand the relationship between traditional and ...
Page Updating the Pragmatic Marketing Framework™ Updating the Pragmatic Marketing Framework by Jim Foxworthy and Steve Johnson
Page Utilizing Co-Design to Create Market-Driven Products Designers are not typically users of a product, yet they often engineer a product with little or no end user involvement—and without understanding in advance ...
Page Version numbers and project names Many product managers are familiar with rules and strategies for product naming, but what about version numbers and project code names? Do we need them? Who own...
Page We built it but no one came Technology-driven companies still believe, "If you build it, they will come." Out of the brilliance of the engineers comes good fortune. After all, customers do...
Page Who Writes the Functional Specification Product Managers produce market requirements and product development produces the tech specs but we're wrestling with who writes the Functional Spec documents a...
Page Working The Plan Using A Plan That Works How you as the Product Manager can help get your Development organization to the point where it has clear, useful, and reliable plans. By Jacques Murphy
Page Writing the Market Requirements Document This document is written for product managers in technology companies who are chartered with writing product requirements and the Market Requirements Document (...
Page You can never have too many product managers Count the number of people in your company who presume to have or assume some part of the product management role. I’m not talking about people who influence ...
Page You Can't Innovate Like Apple When what you teach and develop every day has the title “Innovation” attached to it, you reach a point where you tire of hearing about Apple. Without questi...