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…
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…