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…
I had the opportunity to speak at Agile + DevOpsDays Des Moines today where I delivered Filters not Buckets, prioritization for product people. In the presentation I described a set of prioritization principles and described how to approach prioritization at different stages of the Internal Product Lifecycle. You can get the details from the presentation…
A couple years ago I worked as a freelance product manager at an industrial distributor that had been pieced together after a series of mergers and acquisitions. As a result, the information about their products were spread across multiple systems. The company was trying to follow the industry’s digital transformation trend and every team that…