Anatomy of a roadmap planning fail
The story of how I tried and failed to win buyin from my own team, how I changed the way I spoke about the vision for our product and how I re-framed the con...
2018
Attributes of good deployment tools
Good deployment tools should have the following attributes.
Example roadmap embed
Example roadmap
Product managers are products too
My personal thoughts on an article about how to treat yourself and your career as if it was a product. Useful to think about for anyone who is trying to impr...
Real developers don’t use UIs
Notes and comments on an excellent comparison of the pros and cons of web UIs vs CLIs and when each should be used.
Managing Product Managers
My personal notes and addendums on Brandon Chu’s excellent article about the investor model for managing PMs.
Why does internal corporate software suck?
It’s tempting to think that internal tool UX sucks because people just couldn’t be bothered but perhaps there are times when “just good enough” is the answer.
4 ways to know your engineering team is full of silos
We all know silos in agile engineering teams are something to avoid but can you walk into a brand new team and recognise them immediately? Here’s what I’ve s...
The simple value of writing down the problem
It sounds like something you can skip but writing down the problem (and the current solution if there is one) can have drastic affects on your ability to sol...
2017
Get to the value!
Why we try to focus on one thing at a time.
Product Manager: Level 2
After 6 months in my new role as Product Manager, I feel like I’ve had an epiphany and discovered a new level of value I can add. This post explores what it ...
Dealing with distant future work items
If a Story in the backlog is something you’d like to work on one day, but that day is definitely not in the next 12 months — does it make sense to leave that...
Affordances on the web
How the web confuses users by hiding affordances and multiplying their total number.
Tasks vs Stories vs Bugs vs…
Figuring out the type of issue you’re dealing with can be a common source of discombobulation. This easy analogy helps me figure out how to classify work.
Should we story point our tasks?
Both stories and tasks eat up development time and involve labour. But many teams only put story points on their stories. How do we account for the work that...
What is product management?
A product manager’s job is to drive the vision, strategy, design and success of the product.