Business: Product Management

Product development is complex, so it’s important to have a plan. Your product roadmap serves that purpose and lets you plot the journey ahead and ensure your entire team is aligned.

While it’s crucial to have a well-defined product roadmap at the outset of development, many companies do not have a good system in place for proper project planning. In fact, last year’s Pulse of the Profession report showed that 58% of survey respondents failed to grasp the full value of project management.

A product roadmap can help clear up any confusion and outline a project’s trajectory. Abraham Lincoln once said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax.” If only more of us in software development had that same mindset. Read More

Lean methods are tempting to large organizations. The concept that product owners should shorten iteration cycles to optimize learning and minimize waste is certainly a valuable one. But when Steve Blank and Eric Ries put forth the now world-renowned build-measure-learn model, they did not frame it for the context of enterprise product management. Unfortunately, this has caused unforeseen problems for the otherwise prescient practitioners of this approach.

The primary goal of creating a minimum viable product is not to build something, but instead to learn something. For Ries, who was working at a startup consisting almost entirely of engineers, the easiest way to get their product in front of prospective customers was to build and launch an initial version of it. Hence, the minimum viable product, or MVP. Read More

In Part 1 of this two-part series on agile development, I’ll first describe the four phases of agile development projects:

• Phase 1: Conception
• Phase 2: Definition
• Phase 3: Planning
• Phase 4: Deployment

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