I’ve often wondered if companies looking for product owners have a consistent understanding of what they’re looking for. They don’t. But the ways they differ follow a pattern. Based on a study of LinkedIn product owner job postings, product owners in an internal product setting tend to decide what to build and why. In contrast,…

Matt LeMay asks teams a question that makes people squirm. If you were the CEO of your organization, would you fund your team? Ask it before someone else does, because organizations keep deciding they can do without business analysts. A few years ago the reason was an agile transformation, and the assumption was that the…

I spent months with my team building EDAP-Product, a data platform at an MRO supplier. It pulled product data from three different systems and stitched it into one consistent view, something other teams could finally rely on when they needed to list the MRO supplier’s products for sale across different channels. The platform grew out…

Six weeks into what was supposed to be a straightforward modernization project, someone on the client’s team mentioned, almost in passing, that we’d need to track their hedge transactions too. We thought our goal was to take a 20-year-old PowerBuilder application and rebuild it on modern technology. The app calculated location-specific prices for corn, soybeans,…

When you read an article on product management, do you think, “That’s great for that kind of company, but it’ll never work where I’m at?” If so, you’re probably reading an article that doesn’t specify the context where it applies, and/or you don’t work on a B2C or B2B software product. Most product management writing…

Most strategy sessions don’t fail because the team lacks ideas. They fail because the team leaves with too many of them and no clear way to decide what comes first. Strategy is supposed to guide decisions. When it works, a team walks out knowing what it will focus on and what it has decided not…

I don’t put stakeholder requests directly into the backlog. That doesn’t mean I ignore them. It means a request isn’t automatically a commitment. Almost all product owners have to deal with requests from a wide variety of stakeholders. This is especially the case when you’ve already built an internal product and you’re trying to optimize…

You may have noticed a swing toward CRM/business-systems content this summer. I’m bringing back more of the classic PM/PO/BA material this fall too, starting with a refresh on a topic I originally explored before moving to Substack. An overview of priority Prioritization, or more specifically deciding what you will and will not build, is a…

When I was the product owner at Agile Alliance, we built a custom conference registration system because we believed it required a tight connection to our membership system. It gave us some of the distinctive capabilities we wanted. But as we struggled to support the first conference, we realized it was missing table-stakes features attendees…

I recently worked with a consulting company in the enviable position of having so many leads that they needed a faster way to write proposals for prospective clients. We decided to complete the company’s journey to the dark side and see what Claude could do. We fed it key information about a prospective client, our…