TL;DR: If you’re a product manager at an early-stage company that’s about to hire for sales, and you end up temporarily supporting the entire process ahead of these hires, you may need to get ahead of things. If this is where you are, skip the following intro bits and head down to the Sales Stage Forecasting Process template below.
[Read more…]Product Management & Sales – BFFs?
TL;DR: A strong product and sales relationship is crucial for any company’s success. Ideally, these teams should work together seamlessly with a shared goal and a collaborative spirit. However, tension can sometimes arise, as with any other working relationship. But if you’re in product management and don’t see the sales team as a valuable partner, it’s time to reframe how you view this critical collaboration.
[Read more…]Staff Augmentation for Software Projects – Why and How
What is Staff Augmentation and What Flavors Does it Come In?
Staff Augmentation may be just a new fancy way of saying “Contractor,” or “Consultant,” or similar. However you want to define it, external professionals you bring on to your project become embedded with your own team; whether they’re on site or remote. Typically, these temporary team members will report to your own Business Analysts, Project Manager, Scrum Masters, or whomever your product/project owner happens to be. If you’re sourcing this talent from a firm, they will have their own general management and possibly project management, but but will usually report to someone on your team as a matter of day-to-day workflow.
Typically, staff augmentation will be a relatively simple affair. You’re going to hire an individual or a firm to provide contracting services; usually for a set period of time, maybe with an option to extend a contract. You’re buying skills that you will deploy to a project. This could be to backfill one or two people or add a special skill on a temporary basis. Another option is you’re staffing a whole team. This could be where the externally contracted firm provides not only engineering talent, but also design, project management, and possibly business analysis as well.
Information Architecture: LATCH Is Not Enough
Richard Saul Wurman has been called the father of information architecture. And properly so given that he not only coined the term, but also came up with – among many other things – the acronym of LATCH to describe some core information organization possibilities. So it’s with some trepidation I dare to suggest extending his model. And yet, with time has come our collective experience of dealing with more varied forms and volumes of information via digital channels for which the base model seems dated.
TL;DR version: The LATCH model of information organization includes the following aspects: Location, Alphabet, Time, Category and Hierarchy. It is, however, missing at least the following: Ordinal/Numeric, Distance, and Random. As well, the model lacks depth when it comes to faceted metadata and purpose-focused organization schemes. Okay. That’s it. You’re done. Unless you want to really dive in…
[Read more…]Killer Product Management – Mission and Safety Critical Applications – Part 2
Safety Critical Applications Planning, Design and Development Checklist
In Part 1 I covered some aspects of what constitutes Mission Critical and Safety Critical systems, as well as some high level general concerns. Here, I’m going to provide a simple checklist for these types of products, followed by more detailed explanations of each of the checklist line items.
Suggested Checklist for Mission / Safety Critical Products
The following list may seem appropriate for any type of development work. But see the more detailed explanations below to understand how they’re special for Safety Critical issues.
- Have a culture of safety
- Budget Appropriately
- Assess level of rigor needed
- Choose appropriate project methodology
- Assess Risk
- Get to the real, actual users, somehow
- Re-think how you think about Design
- Account for user types, training and skill levels
- Create easily trackable and auditable systems
- Consider Architectural Implications
- Plan for potential failure – Communications and Fix Plans
- After launch validation
So now let’s go just a bit more in depth for these areas. As with Part 1, this list covers the basic concerns and you can just stop here if you like. Thanks for stopping by. Or… Read on for details.
[Read more…]Killer Product Management – Mission and Safety Critical Applications – Part 1
Introduction
The title isn’t a euphemism. This is about when product management decisions can do damage.
In Part 1 of this writeup, I’m going to define some of the challenges for Mission and Safety Critical applications as compared to typical development. If you want to skip right to more practical considerations for what to do about such things, go right to Part 2, with a checklist followed by explanations of the line items.
Over the years I’ve moved from consumer oriented products to B2B and B2B2C, most recently several years working on healthcare solutions. On this path, I’ve learned a lot about Safety Critical application issues. It’s stuck me that people who ‘grew up’ in such environments may have a lot of this knowledge through intrinsic experience. But for those transitioning to such areas or in startup mode who haven’t been there, (as was my path), it’s possible there’s knowledge gaps. What I often do when learning new things is take note in my own Wiki, and over time develop some degree of body of knowledge in a subject area. So my goal now is to share back what I’ve learned for those who may find it useful.
What’s the difference between “Mission Critical” or more extremely, “Safety Critical” vs. “typical” product management? Rather than try to formerly define it, let’s keep it simple. Safety Critical products are those that – for certain failure modes – can hurt or kill people. (Or cause significant property or environmental damage.) Often, they’re things that move in our environment; that is, actually do things. A basic compare and contrast might be an advertising delivery system for content vs. an insulin pump; failure of the first maybe means some lost money, whereas failure of the second… clear enough, right? Mission Critical – as distinct from Safety Critical – might mean less severe human consequences, but a ‘hard’ failure or challenge nonetheless. E.g., a failure in a basic regulatory compliance issue could result in anything from minor work stoppage or fines though potential criminal negligence. Or a failure of the software on a Mars Rover results in loss of the unit, associated waste and data loss. No one gets hurt or dies, but the mission is basically lost.
In short, these are not really applications where we want to “fail fast and learn.” These are apps that have somewhat more crisp “Minimum Viable Product“ standards when it comes to the “Viable” part.
The Short Version of Issues for Mission / Safety Critical Products
- Mission and Safety Critical systems demand something beyond basic Agile Product / Project management approaches. (And this may include products in highly regulated areas as well.)
- There is often a moral component that exists beyond other types of products / services.
- More planning is required than for non-critical systems.
- Agility may be more often impacted by external dependencies.
- So called “Non-functional” requirements may become critical.
- Risk assessments must be included as a core concern.
- There’s a suggested checklist for Mission / Safety Critical Products in Part 2 of this writeup that you may find useful if you work on these types of products.
That’s it. You can stop reading now. But for fuller discussion of these points, please continue. Or skip to Part 2 for the just mentioned checklist items.
[Read more…]User Persona Template
In an earlier article, I provided some templates for Customer Journey Mapping. And I even mentioned how you might need to do different maps for various customer cohorts. What I didn’t provide was any guidance about those cohorts. So I’m going to try to fix that now.
As is often the case, there’s a lot of tools and templates out there for creating user personas. Some of the tools are behind paywalls as part of various product management tool software. And a lot of this stuff is really good. But also potentially expensive for startups or small teams. But the “free” templates are often either poor, (my opinion), or behind presentation template paywalls or possibly riddled with embedded malware. So here you go…
I’d originally produced this template as part of a product management training program I’d built for one of the large online courseware offerings, but the template itself is already public so here it is:
[Read more…]Feature Ideation and Evaluation for Product Managers
We have models for trying to ideate what features might be good to include in a product or service. And we’ve got ways to assess idea value. But how often do we really think about the many potential input sources for creating ideas? And what about how we can quickly round out those initial ideas? The following write up assumes that we’re talking about existing products and enhancing them.
We have tools from typical brainstorming sessions to Design Sprints. But again, what about the root sources of ideas? Are there structured ways to try to get to some good ideas? I’m going to offer up a few depictions of idea sources, as well as some ways to quickly assess some early ideas. This latter part, quick initial assessment – or triage, is really the main point. There’s already plenty written about idea development, innovation workshops and the like. But fast assessment is increasingly important. The Minimum Viable Product and Scrum worlds are – at their core – really about trying to sell speed. Yes, yes, I know… the goal is the right product and feature set at speed, but it at least feels over the past decade or so that the desire for speed has been more at the forefront. (In spite of what’s being sold as the product-market fit benefits of the methods.)
Personally, I believe at a fundamental level there’s only two real sources of new product ideas…
- Flash of Insight: This is when you just have that “ah hah” moment. It’s when you’re using some kitchen item and say, “why doesn’t someone make this.” Or a digital product and you think, “you know, if only I had THIS everything would be great.” At that point, you can send an idea into a company, or build your own products if you’re feeling entrepreneurial. But the raw source of your idea was an experience of a visceral need to solve an issue to which you had a solution based response.
- Research: Yes. Of course. Research. Obvious, right? But is it really? There are a lot of different ways to do consumer and marketplace research.
And what about when it’s time to actually craft these ideas into features? We have the modern idea of a Story when we’re using Agile. And there’s a simplistic idea of “What is our Definition of Done” for a story, also referred to as “Acceptance Criteria.” But in some ways, this last bit is really an add on to try to fix the fact that Scrum – for all it’s speedy goodness – may have dropped too much off as it tried to abandon Waterfall methods and heavier product definition documents. Ignoring potential holes doesn’t make them go away. Maybe a bit more needs to be done prior to a sprint planning meeting. While every line item on the lists below doesn’t need to be in the recipe every time, it’s still useful to have a checklist. So I’m going to present some tools for a three phase approach to frame these issues. Here’s the categories and links to the presentations and templates if you don’t feel like wading through the rest of the Step-by-Step explanatory text that follows.
Charts / Sheets Tools for your use…
NOTE: These are meant to be checklists. There are likely too many steps here. You have to edit these down so they apply to your situation.
- Feature Ideation: Sources and Processes
- Feature Round Out (Better Definitions)
- More Formal Feature Prioritization
If you want a little background first, let me take a few moments to go through each of these…
[Read more…]Customer Journey Map Template
While working on a new component of a project, I had occasion to build out a Customer Journey Map. Even though I’ve done this several times before, I’d kind of just cobbled together a map using Omnigraffle or LucidChart or some other drawing program. But this time I had to do a few of them and wanted a more common format template. What I found was a ton of examples in image search, but very few usable editable templates. (There were a few behind some paywalls and seemingly sketchy download requirements, but not much else.)
[Read more…]The Order: Vision, Mission, Goals, Strategies, Objectives, Tactics
Why anyone would want to re-hash this topic is a fair question. It came out of a discussion I had with some relatively junior product managers who came to Product, as is often the case, from other specialties. So many management books and courses… So many definitions of the same things. So many years of struggle. And yet… we still have differing definitions, suggestions, and apparently confusion about what seem to be the basics for high level strategy and associated concepts. You can easily search for some of these key words and find other authors with completely opposite viewpoints of each other. But not always explanations as to why. I, perhaps foolishly, think I might understand where some of the confusion has come into play. And since I’ve got what I think might be a path through this, I’m going to give it a shot…
There’s a really long writeup coming, but here’s the short version…
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