Most people who own business systems treat stakeholder requests like orders. Someone asks for a chatbot, you build a chatbot. Someone asks for a new workflow, you configure a new workflow. Visible responsiveness feels like good service, and most organizations reward it. Unfortunately, fulfilling requests verbatim is one of the fastest ways to make a…
Deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you already know the answer is you. Every time a pipeline stage needs updating, a workflow breaks, or a report stops making sense everyone in the room looks at you. You own the system. Nobody said it out loud. It just happened. Knowing you’re responsible…
Maybe your boss picked you to own the CRM. Maybe the person who used to administer the CRM left (or was laid off). Maybe you complained too loudly and too often about how broken the CRM was. However it happened, you now have a new responsibility, and you’re not sure how to fulfill it. Now…
Earlier this week, a client sent me this message: “Can we update how this option is labeled? Some customers pick the wrong one because they think the current label only applies to a specific trim level.” Simple enough request. Change a label, close the ticket. But before I touched anything, I took a few minutes…
A business services company I once worked with wanted to switch to a new CRM system so they could save money and better track their sales pipeline. They had some fairly involved business processes in place to track their sales pipeline and report on actual and potential revenue. On the surface, the move made sense….
You haven’t seen an InsideProduct issue in a while. In that time, the work behind this newsletter shifted, and the newsletter needs to catch up to the work most of you do. Most of you aren’t building shiny external products. You’re working on CRMs, workflow tools, ticketing systems, ERPs, and internal applications that keep your…
Over the course of my career, I’ve witnessed a few trends in software development. Many of these trends seem to take on the characteristics of a pendulum where practices swing from way over bearing to woefully insufficient. Both extremes lead to difficulties for teams which drives to eventually find a happy medium. The documentation pendulum…
I like attending conferences because they offer a bit of insight into what others’ worlds look like. The insight doesn’t come from the speakers on stage, they come from the conversations at the lunch table. Although ironically, this story starts at the speaker’s dinner table the night before a conference. I was at a conference…
Do you work at a company switching from a project to a product approach (ie undergoing a product transformation)? If so, and that company is in an industry that doesn’t actually sell software products, you most likely work on internal products, or you’re an IT Product Manager. You may also not really care what it’s…
Earlier this week I spoke at ProjectSummit*BusinessAnalystWorld in Chicago, a conference for business analysts and project managers. Given the audience, I figured Backlog Refinement: “Writing user stories” is not the whole story would be an appropriate presentation. As happened last week, there were some great questions that I thought I’d share along with what I…