Several of my clients want to plan the product roadmap and then “work to the plan.” They think the roadmap is the long-term goal. But roadmaps aren’t goals. Instead, they are tactics for achieving a long-term goal. That means we need long-term goals based on both the corporate strategy and each product’s strategy. Those are two […]
A senior leader, Jim, emailed me to clarify how to track a project’s progress. He’s a sales guy by training and is now leading a technology-based company. He’s confused. When he asks about progress, he feels as if everyone takes one step forward and two steps back, just as in the Project Kisses of Death
When I wrote Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management, I included this chart, the Iterations Content Chart as part of a possible dashboard. I created that chart to clarify the challenges a specific team faced. They had problems with multitasking and the inevitable changes. The first way to use an iteration contents
When Mark, my husband, and I moved into this house a decade ago, we faced the problem many other people face: what to keep and what to toss (or recycle, etc.). Mark had a particularly difficult time with the kitchen drawer that held all the old baby dishes and utensils. I wanted to toss everything
Jenny, a product leader, glared at her supposed product backlog. She’d just transferred to this product and now she knew why the teams weren’t making progress. This backlog was more like her overstuffed sports closet. That closet had tennis rackets, a bat, and her two pairs of skis—all sports, but not for any one specific
I’m almost at the end of the January Practical Product Owner workshop. One of the participants has a problem I’ve seen before. They have a backlog of work, and it’s all tasks. Not a story in sight. I understand how that happens. Here are some ways I’ve seen the tasks-not-stories problem occur: The technical people