In honor of week 1 of the 2025 college football season here in the states, I thought I’d share a piece of work advice with a sports angle. I’ve heard it said that the main purpose of managing up is to make your boss’s life easier. Sometimes, making their life easier means making your own…
I came all the way to Ireland this week to see a college football game that I’d usually see in a freezing football stadium in November. It also provides an excuse to spend a week seeing this lovely country in the lead up to the game. To be honest, the game is really just an…
If you’ve been reading InsideProduct for a while, you’ve probably picked up by now that I focus on solving the right problem and ignoring everything else. I’ve found that one, or a small series of discovery sessions are an excellent way to identify what that problem is and also understand the constraints you have on…
One of the interesting (challenging?) aspects of product management is how every organization seems to have its own interpretation of what a product manager actually should do. It gets even more jumbled in those organizations that are trying to adopt product management for internal products and in their IT organizations. I don’t think you’re ever…
If your organization is transitioning from projects to products for its internal software development efforts, you may ask some variation of this question: How is product funding /financial tracking supposed to work? Chances are you spiced up that question with an explicative or two for good measure. Thanks for reading InsideProduct! Subscribe for free to…
If you build your product roadmap based on outcomes, you have an idea of which problems you’re planning to tackle now, next, and later but you probably don’t have clarity on exactly how you’re going to solve those problems. And that is perfectly ok. You need to be able to identify different options for solving…
I suspect if you asked a collection of people who work in IT, you’d get just as many people who say that designers aren’t necessary as you do people who say they are. I’d suggest the former group is wrong. I’ve always had the impression that internal products can gain a great deal from the…
When organizations go through some form of transformation, they inevitably end up with people who they aren’t sure how they fit in the organizational structure. In other words… Move out or move over Sometimes, especially when organizations get transformation help from accounting firms turned consultancies, they get rid of just about everyone in a particular…
When you read an article on software product management, do you immediately think “that’s a great idea, I’m going to try it out right away!” Or do you think “that’s great for that type of product/company, but it will never work where I’m at?” If you frequently have the latter reaction, chances are you’re reading…
I’ve talked before about how helpful creating examples can be to build a shared understanding of how your product should behave – example mapping. This week I had another reminder about how helpful examples can be. This time it was getting things back on track when I didn’t put examples together earlier. I once worked…