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…

If you’ve ever customized a purchased system, or found that a system you built lacked many expected features, you made a build vs. buy choice. And the odds are you chose poorly. Thanks for reading InsideProduct! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Maybe you’ve already made that mistake. If you…

Of all the factors that overwhelm system owners, there are two that are the most common and the most intrusive. The first one is too many requests for changes. The second one is the fanatical quest for innovation in your solution to those requests. The second one is less well known and more insidious. Let…

You’re collecting stories instead of requirements. That insight will save you from a lot of bad projects if you’ve somehow become the person who owns a system. When you get requests like we need a custom expense module or make the new tool work like the old one, it feels easier to say yes than…

If someone clearly owns a business system once it goes live (and that someone is you), you’re a lot less likely to end up with a Frankenstein pricing app, a brittle CRM, or a Jira instance everyone hates. The home-rolled pricing app, the under-used HubSpot features, and the over-configured Jira instance are examples of what…

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…