The new user story backlog is a map. Why the flat user story backlog doesn’t work, and how to build a better backlog that will help you more effectively explain your system, prioritize, and plan your releases. This is Gary. Gary and I worked together for a day to build a user story map - a better version of a product backlog. Building a user story map helps us focus on the big picture - the product as a whole instead of getting myopically focused on an individual story. When it comes time to prioritize, Gary did so with the entire context of the system in view. In Gary's case he originally set out to build Mimi - short for Music Industry Marketing Interface.
Mimi shipped after a lot of sweat and effort from Gary, Dave Hoover, and the fine folks at Obtiva. Flat backlogs don't work for me One of the more troubling things, for me, about common Agile development practice is the idea of the flat user story backlog. I'm writing this from the plane as I fly back from a client site. "We spend lots of time working with our customers. Top UK Sports Psychologist Report On The Psychology Of Football Managers. The Confidence Coach's Sports Psychology Reports Sports Psychology Report - Football Coaching Types The Coaching Types research and report was created by Martin Perry, for McDonald's Grassroots Football Programme.
The aim of this special Sports Psychology report is to categorise contemporary football managers into distinct psychological types. So the managers are grouped into five distinct types. In addition the top four current managers are observed for their behaviour under pressure. Also, the players are categorized into psychological types. Psychological Type 1: The Thinker Psychological Type 2: The Motivator Psychological Type 3: The Hard Man Psychological Type 4: The Assassin Psychological Type 5: The Organiser The Top Four Managers - Behaviours & Observations The Players - Psychological Types Contact Martin Perry - Confidence Coaching & Sports Psychology: 0044 (0) 77897 56425 The Sports Psychology Reports Section Get my FREE Ebook Here.
How six people built the #2 mobile analytics tool in just a few months. The more I thought about it, the more I felt committed to it. Answers. Of course. I should have thought about this sooner. Well, it should be simple enough to get it changed. Except, there was a problem. I picked up the phone, called Jeff and said, “We made a mistake. I said, “If you’re really hungry do you want a recipe or do you just want dinner? I’m sure Jeff thought I was crazy -- not only because of that analogy, but because we were 48 hours away from the launch of Insights. “I’m on board. Brian was the Product Manager of the Insights product, and fairly new to the team, so this would definitely be a trial-by-fire moment. I can remember being on a three-way call with Jeff and Brian, not knowing how he’d react. Put yourself in Brian’s shoes. “Hey Brian”, I began, ”So, I was just talking with Jeff and we think we need to change the product name from Insights to Answers.
Brian’s response was simple: “Your rationale makes total sense Wayne, I trust you guys. Flow.pdf. Harvard Bonin's Blog - The Elimination of Waste: Lean Six Sigma applied toward Game Development. The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company. These days one must only search online to find many project management techniques that are prevalent within general software development but are not utilized often in game creation. While Scrum has made a strong push into game production, many other techniques remain on the sidelines.
This is unfortunate since other methods from Traditional and Agile methodologies can be applied to our industry and could help yield positive results. In this article I will not explain Lean Six Sigma in detail. Lean Six Sigma is a combination of two project management techniques called “Lean” and “Six Sigma”. Lean: Focuses on delivering customer value efficiently above all other activities. Six Sigma: Focuses on removing all defects and variation from the process. Here is the academic definition. How to hire a product manager - by Ken Norton. Ken Norton Partner, Google Ventures Follow @kennethn It's been a while since I was hiring at a startup, and recruiting at a startup is very different from hiring at a big company.
At Yahoo! I started my career as an engineer and advanced pretty quickly into engineering management. Remember friend, nobody asked you to show up Product management may be the one job that the organization would get along fine without (at least for a good while). 1. So what do I look for in a PM? 2. Some managers I've known insist on hiring only PMs with computer science degrees. Why did you decide to move from engineering to product management? 3. This next category is highly subjective, difficult to evaluate, and extraordinarily important. Independently echoed some of my own concerns about my product - if you're a good PM, you've got a bunch of things that worry you about your own product. 4. Product managers are usually leaders in their organizations. Is consensus always a good thing? 5. 6. About Ken Norton. The product manager's lament. Life is not easy when you're working in an old-fashioned waterfall development process, no matter what role you play.
But I have a special sympathy for the "product manager" in a startup that is bringing a new product to a new market, and doing their work in large batches. I met one recently that is working on a really innovative product, and the stories I heard from their development team made me want to cringe. The product manager was clearly struggling to get results from the rest of the team.
These are smart people trying hard to all row in the same direction. So why are they having so much difficulty? Let's start with what the product manager does. This system naturally lends itself to a pipeline approach, which the product manager organizes. When I met this team, some acrimony had built up. It doesn't take long to discover that the product manager is being forced to write every spec five times.
What's wrong with this picture? Work in cross-functional teams. The only thing that matters. Jun 25, 2007 This post is all about the only thing that matters for a new startup. But first, some theory: If you look at a broad cross-section of startups -- say, 30 or 40 or more; enough to screen out the pure flukes and look for patterns -- two obvious facts will jump out at you. First obvious fact: there is an incredibly wide divergence of success -- some of those startups are insanely successful, some highly successful, many somewhat successful, and quite a few of course outright fail.
Second obvious fact: there is an incredibly wide divergence of caliber and quality for the three core elements of each startup -- team, product, and market. At any given startup, the team will range from outstanding to remarkably flawed; the product will range from a masterpiece of engineering to barely functional; and the market will range from booming to comatose. And so you start to wonder -- what correlates the most to success -- team, product, or market? Let's start by defining terms. So: Why? What I Learned Building Medium (So Far) As of November 2012 We’re now eight months into building Medium, having started in earnest in February of this year.
In August, we launched what I call the “preview” version—which included viewing content publicly and creation for a small whitelist of folks. No real homepage, discovery, profiles, or many other important features. We’re now in the process of rolling out several of those things, as well as changing other stuff. So, we’re still in the nascent stages. Still, it’s been educational. Even if they’re awesome, having too big of a team will slow you down.
One of the luxuries we’ve had at Obvious is the ability to hire an amazingly high-caliber engineering and design team. I always assumed, even if we had a few too many people to start, we’d quickly need all of them as the product began to take shape. Capable people need meaty challenges. Nothing clarifies focus like a date. Historically, I’ve been constrained by engineering resources and money. Usage is like oxygen for ideas. Jack Dorsey: The CEO as Chief Editor. What does a Product Manager at Facebook do? - Quora. What is Amazon's approach to product development and product management? PM at Microsoft - Steven Sinofsky's Microsoft TechTalk. While at Stanford this week I was asked by a number of PM (program manager) candidates to talk about the PM role at Microsoft. The PM role is unique to Microsoft and was actually created in response to developing software that is more usable and at the same time pushes the state of the art of technology.
So when we talk about PM at Microsoft, we're talking from a perspective of creating and evolving the role over the lifetime of the PC industry. I have been both a PM and an SDE (software design engineer) during my career at Microsoft. When I was recruited I started off as an SDE candidate and then I learned about PM during the course of my interviews and I thought "COOL! " that has to be a job for me--after all it sure sounds like an incredibly cool role, since it has the title "manager" in it and if you read/hear the description it sure sounds like you're running the show. What follows is a description of program management from a PM perspective -- that means through the lens of a PM.
10 principes fondamentaux – Société – Google. Nous avons rédigé cette liste quelques années après la création de Google. Nous la mettons régulièrement à jour afin qu'elle soit toujours d'actualité, et espérons que vous la trouverez pertinente. Recherchez l'intérêt de l'utilisateur ; le reste suivra. Depuis sa création, la société Google s'efforce d'offrir aux internautes la meilleure expérience utilisateur possible. Lorsque nous concevons un nouveau navigateur Internet ou lorsque nous apportons un plus à l'aspect de notre page d'accueil, c'est votre confort que nous cherchons à satisfaire, et non un quelconque objectif interne, ni les exigences de résultats de la société. L'interface est simple et claire, et les pages se chargent instantanément. The only metric that matters. I've been lucky to be part of the early growth of several really interesting and now important networks including LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.
One of the things that I felt working on each of these is that we never looked at numbers or metrics in the abstract -- total page views, logged in accounts, etc, but we always talked about users. More specifically, what they were doing and why they were doing it. At LinkedIn we didn't talk about "total page views", but instead "profile views" - how many people were using LinkedIn to search for and find other people, and how many people were on LinkedIn being viewed. At Twitter while we had (and they still have) crazy page view numbers, we talked instead about how many people were looking at their timeline and reading tweets or tweeting. When I meet new companies today, I often hear things like "We have 10M uniques with 30M page views per month. " How many people are really using your product?
You need a metric that specifically answers this. Dsatetsy. Design for Continuous Experimentation. The Agony and Ecstasy of Building with Data — The Year of the Looking Glass. Ah, Data. And of course, Data’s best friend, A/B Test. They’re like the the It couple of many a young software company these days. You can’t seem to turn a corner or make a sandwich without encountering their know-it-all allure or the gleaming exactness of their figures.
The hype is quite warranted. There are few tools more powerful. Alas, as with most things in life these two can dangerously overused. Don’t end up in rehab. Data Pitfall #1: Picking the wrong metric to optimize for. It’s nice to have a metric that everyone can rally behind. The problem is that it’s impossible to distill value into one metric. Pretty much everyone understands this at a theoretical level. Data Pitfall #2: Over-pivoting towards what’s measurable. Okay, let’s say you didn’t pick the wrong metric. But of course it’s important. Data Pitfall #3: Biasing towards the short-term. The Specification is Dead; Long Live the Specification. In the olden days, most people followed a waterfall method. It involved writing “complete” specifications on exactly what had to be built, how it would be built, how it would work, look, etc.
You’d have the “complete” package of documentation up-front and then you’d start coding. Seems like eons ago… Then we were introduced to agile development, which encouraged us to throw away big specifications and go with user stories, or to eliminate documentation entirely and just start coding, building things iteratively. I’m greatly simplifying the evolution of software development into a couple paragraphs, but you know the drill — specifications went from being necessities to being outlawed. To draw a quick parallel, the same has happened (to a large extent) with business plans.
I’d say the same holds true for specifications. I like to write. My specifications often include descriptions of things we may (or will likely) build in the future. Specifications aren’t writ in stone. Bad Managers Talk, Good Managers Write. IAC's HowAboutWe co-founder: How to Avoid Delusional Thinking in Start-up Growth Strategy (Guest Post) at. [Andrew: Trying to build and launch dating apps is a favorite pastime of 20-something tech entrepreneurs. However, dating products are notoriously hard to grow because it requires people to be “in-market” and also they don’t necessarily want their friends to know they’re online dating.
Today, we have a great piece from a veteran of the space. Earlier this year, IAC bought HowAboutWe, a new dating product that was trying to reinvent the entire experience so that it’d focus on activities rather than dating profiles. The cofounder, Aaron Schildkrout, contributed the following essay below, enumerating the difficulties of the various growth channels, and also more generally, how to be realistic about your growth strategy. Aaron Schildkrout:How to Avoid Delusional Thinking in Start-up Growth Strategy So, you have a consumer internet idea you think could be big. The statistics say you’re are almost surely wrong. In this piece I’ll focus on this fifth demon: Magical strategy for growth. A. B. Understanding How The Innovator's Dilemma Affects You. One of the most influential books of my career is The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clay Christensen. I cannot recommend it enough for people in the technology or media sectors.
Many people bandy about the definitions of “disruptive technology” or “the innovator’s dilemma” without ever having read the book and almost universally misunderstand the concepts. Let me start with Professor Christensen’s definition: “An innovation that is disruptive allows a whole new population of consumers access to a product or service that was historically only accessible to consumers with a lot of money or a lot of skill.” Professor Christensen uses real data from the disk drive industry to make his points. Reading it felt like read a university book for an economics class and no wonder since he’s a professor at Harvard Business School.
The thesis of the book is that incumbents in markets – especially large and well entrenched markets – seldom survive fundamental technology changes in their industries. The One Cost Engineers and Product Managers Don't Consider - First Round Review. Product Strategy Means Saying No. The Tax of New — The Year of the Looking Glass. Ben Kamens, It's ok to be embarrassed about what your product... Ben Kamens, "Shipping beats perfection" explained. Guide to Product Planning: Three Feature Buckets. What are the best ways to prioritize a list of product features? - Quora. 50 Articles and Books that will Make you a Great Product Manager. 5 Hard Questions to Ask Yourself During a Conflict — The Year of the Looking Glass. How to Present Designs — The Year of the Looking Glass. The Art of Decision Making as a Product Manager. How to Work with Engineers — The Year of the Looking Glass. How to Work with Designers — The Year of the Looking Glass. Why companies should have Product Editors, not Product Managers at andrewchen.
What innate traits do great Internet product leaders share? What makes someone a great product manager at Google? The DNA of Product Management | Hunter Walk. A Product Manager’s Job. Be A Great Product Leader (Dropbox / AirBnB 2013) Top 10 Product Leadership Lessons. We are Product Managers | Venture Generated Content. Get One Thing Right. Software Inventory. How to work with software engineers - by Ken Norton. How to hire a product manager - by Ken Norton. Leading cross-functional teams - by Ken Norton. Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule. Do Things that Don't Scale. How to Get Startup Ideas.
Good-product-manager.pdf. How to Spot the Five-Tool Superstar | Jeff Weiner. Quora. PM at Microsoft - Steven Sinofsky's Microsoft TechTalk. Be a Great Product Leader. Good-product-manager.pdf.