Entries from February 2010 ↓
February 28th, 2010 — General
After almost four and half years, my time at Ryma has come to an end. On Monday March 1st I am starting my new role as a Senior Product Manager with ACL Services Ltd. Some of you may know, I moved to Vancouver and this is an extension of that change.
ACL provides audit analytics and monitoring software to the audit and controls professions and the financial management community.
Doing professional services for Ryma has offered me the opportunity grow professionally, but most importantly meet, both in-person and online, a bunch of really great people across the world. I have seen how you work and plan to apply as many of those best practices that you have shared.
I am looking forward to the challenges that face me in taking on a new-to-me product in a new-to-me market.
I guess it is time to practice what I have been preaching!
February 23rd, 2010 — General
I was able to find a rock star graphic designer who made me a professional looking logo for my blog. Yeah! For those of you reading through RSS, click the link to check it out – www.strategicproductmanager.com.
If you enjoyed this post, please leave a comment or subscribe to the feed to receive future updates. You can also follow me on Twitter. Tell other people about this post.
February 9th, 2010 — Product Management
I have read some interesting posts recently and I thought I would share a few with you here.
22 JAN 10 – Agile Product Manager Chapter “Scaling Software Agility”
… I’ve decided to push this early draft Chapter out for review and comments…
22 JAN 10 – A CEO’s Perspective of Personas “Where the Product Management Tribe Gathers”
…I have been engaged with several companies recently who are pursuing personas as an avenue into buyer and user knowledge, and an intimate look at the behaviors, goals and motivating factors of each…
25 JAN 10 – Product Management Interview: Jim Holland “Product Management Meets Pop Culture”
…kicking off a series of one-on-one interviews with product management professionals…
27 JAN 10 – The Basics of Software as a Service Pricing “The Software Maven”
…It is pretty unanimous that software pricing is one of the hardest parts of a product manager’s job…
27 JAN 10 – Pragmatic Personas “StickyMinds.com”
…Knowing who will use your software is important to the software development process. Having the end user in mind helps you develop features that fit the user’s needs…
28 JAN 10 – My Rules “outside-in view”
…This is a tab on my site here where I will list the rules I believe are worth following for product managers and product marketers…
01 FEB 10 – Lunch is an event. Product launch is a process. “Launch Clinic”
…Too often we think about product launch as an event. The magic product launch checklist is consulted…
03 FEB 10 – Using Metrics to Manage the Growth Stage “Pivotal Product Management blog”
…Measuring product success throughout the product life cycle is a fundamental skill for product managers in any size or type of organization…
05 FEB 10 – “10 Books To Make You A Better Product Manager” “The Experience is the Product”
…These are not books that tell you how to do product management. Rather, these books are full of ideas that will challenge you to work smarter, communicate better, and get in the heads of your users…
08 FEB 10 – Removing Features “ignore the code”
…Applications have a natural tendency to grow…
09 FEB 10 – Setting prioritites grounded in the market “ProductMarketing.com”
…If you’ve ever had to review a long list of requirements, you’ll appreciate this…
You can always track what I am reading here (delicious.com) and here (Google Shared).
If you enjoyed this post, please leave a comment or subscribe to the feed to receive future updates. You can also follow me on Twitter. Tell other people about this post.
February 9th, 2010 — Product Management, Roadmaps, Strategy
I suspect that one of the major impacts to your roadmap is a budget change. And by change, I mean a reduction in available funds for product development. I suspect a lot of you dealt with this last year as you suffered through many rounds in workforce reduction. I am curious how you handled that.
Picture this scenario, late last fall you reviewed all your feature requests, dusted off the roadmap, the business case is shiny again and it is all aligned with your vision and the corporate vision. With your budget approved, you are ready for 2010. Enter January 2010 and due to slightly missing the Q4 numbers you are now forced to chop $75,000 from your budget. Basically the equivalent of one developer. What do you do?
- Band together with the other product lines and pray for Management to realize that chopping 75k is guaranteed to affect more than 75k in revenue this year?
- Offer to combine forces with another product to share revenue (knowing that you will likely never be able to undo this) in hopes that your new increased revenue will offset your requirement to reduce cost?
- Suck it up, chop the developer and leave the roadmap unchanged and modify the business case (i.e. budget) to reflect the reduced cost but leaving the revenue numbers unchanged? The more with less scenario or in this case same with less.
- Suck it up, chop the developer and scale back the roadmap and business case (i.e. budget) to reflect the reduced cost and revenue numbers?
I am less inclined to do anything that will affect revenue for future years. Depending on how many rounds of workforce reduction you have survived, I am less comfortable selling the same with less scenario. If you are in your first or second round, go with that. Teams generally perform better after the first and second cuts. I am not hopeful they will “see the light” and let you keep a full team in hopes of achieving your revenue targets. Although, this is probably the scenario I start with. Sell the vision, sell the facts and get buy-in on the business case. Failing that, cut, reduce and move forward.
I am hopeful someone will share a situation where a budget cut has affected their roadmap and how they responded.
I meant no offense to any development types by suggesting we cut you, it was a just a random example. We really hate cutting our roadmap in any scenario.
If you enjoyed this post, please leave a comment or subscribe to the feed to receive future updates. You can also follow me on Twitter. Tell other people about this post.
February 8th, 2010 — Events, Product Management
We are searching Agile Product Management submissions for the Agile 2010 conference in Nashville. The Agile 2010 submission process will be somewhat different than in past years. In the past submissions would be submitted to individual stages for consideration. This year you will be submitting to one of the broad conference themes, Business, Technical, and Leadership & Organization. Once submitted the program committee will identify and forward to the most appropriate stage. The length of the sessions will either be 60 or 90 minutes and will be presented Tuesday – Thursday ONLY.
Please contact me if you have any questions, I am on the review committee.
The submission system will be open on January 11, 2010 and will remain open until February 26, 2010. Please see this link for more information – Agile 2010 Be a Speaker (http://agile2010.agilealliance.org/speaker.html).
** New link: http://agile2010.agilealliance.org/product
Business Theme Stages
Agile Product Management: As with many disciplines, agile techniques leverage our best practices, adapting them with short, empirical feedback loops. This track presents and explores: What best practices in product management are leveraged by agile teams? How have product management practices been adapted for agile? What new product management techniques have emerged from agile teams?
If you enjoyed this post, please leave a comment or subscribe to the feed to receive future updates. You can also follow me on Twitter. Tell other people about this post.
February 4th, 2010 — Events
I’m pleased to announce I am on the Agile Conference Review Committee for 2010 for the Agile Product Management track. The Product Manager review committee is lead by Rich Mironov of Enthiosys.
This year, the conference is in Nashville, TN, August 9-13. The deadline for submissions is February 26th.
Visit http://agile2010.agilealliance.org/ for more information.
