June 29, 2017
Map of the Fredrick Half-Marathon
A product roadmap is a powerful tool. Roadmaps help link products and services to the strategy, objectives and key results. Roadmaps are directional, answer the question of where we are going and why. Roadmaps are powerful – unless they are messed up! There are four common mistakes that will reduce the value of a roadmap. (more…)
June 27, 2017
Product roadmaps come in many sizes and flavors and depending on size and flavor answer a myriad of questions. There are several common threads through all product roadmaps. The common threads are:
June 20, 2017
A Roadmap Provides Direction
Product roadmaps are a tool used to visually present an approach to translating a business strategy into the real world. The visualization of the impact of a strategy on a product allows all relevant constituencies to grasp how a product and its enablers are intended to evolve.
In order to create and use product roadmaps, there are several key concepts and components that need to be agreed upon. (more…)
June 18, 2017
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SPaMCAST 447 features our interview with Angela Wick on the role of the Product Owner and Business Analyst in Agile efforts. These two roles are critically important for delivering value in an Agile environment. Angela provides a fresh take on the Product Owner role and the Product Owner’s relationship to other roles Agile teams.
Angela is the founder of BA-Squared, LLC, a training and consulting practice. She is passionate about modernizing requirements practices and helping organizations collaborate on a Product Vision aligned to strategy and guiding them to a meaningful backlog and iterations that keep the customer and organizational value top of mind.
She trains, coaches and teaches organizations on Product Ownership and Agile BA!
Email: Angela@BA-Squared.Com
Web: http://www.ba-squared.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/angelawickcbap
Twitter: https://twitter.com/WickAng
This is not first time the SPaMCAST has featured essays and conversations on the role of product owners ( for exampleSPaMCAST 430 and SPaMCAST 325).
Re-Read Saturday News
Chapter 9 continues the third section of Holacracy, Evolution Installed: Living Holacracy. Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World by Brian J. Robertson was published by Henry Holt and Company in 2015. This week’s chapter is titled If You’re Not Ready To Adopt: Moving Toward Holacracy. In this chapter Robertson softens his if-you-can’t-do-it-all-don’t-do-anything approach. (more…)
May 28, 2017
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This week’s Software Process and Measurement Cast features our essay revisiting the product owner role. The product owner role is hard, often messed up and a great opportunity for improvement.
The second column features the return of Steve Tendon talking about Tame The Flow: Hyper-Productive Knowledge-Work Performance, The TameFlow Approach and Its Application to Scrum and Kanban published J Ross (buy a copy here). We tackle Chapter 17 which is titled Challenges of Work-State Work in Process Limits. WIP limits have their plusses and minuses when discussing hyper-productivity.
Our third column this week is from Jeremy Berriault. Jeremy discusses how to show the value of QA and why knowing and showing value is important! Jeremy blogs at https://jberria.wordpress.com/
Re-Read Saturday News
This week we tackle Chapter 6 of Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World by Brian J. Robertson published by Henry Holt and Company in 2015. Chapter 6, Facilitating Governance, puts the ideas and processes defined in governance to work. (more…)
May 11, 2017
Control!
The product owner (PO) role is incredibly important in any Agile effort. The product owner leads, manages and prioritizes the backlog and networks with stakeholders, customers, and developers of all stripes. All sorts of problems can beset the role. However, most of those problems are either self-inflicted or a result of poor organizational design. A laundry list of problems based on observation and responses from other product owners include:
The next set of difficulties are: (more…)
May 9, 2017
Accept no substitute.
The product owner (PO) role even when performed as described straight out of the book is difficult. The role is often even more difficult than it needs to be, with information asymmetries between the PO, the team and stakeholders ranging to ill-defined roles. I asked over fifty product owners about why they thought the role was hard to augment my perception. I have scattered excerpts from their responses throughout the essay. Based on observation and responses the most common reasons the role is difficult are: (more…)
