Phillip Starke
Sometimes you come across a book at just the right time. The content immediately makes sense and you cannot stop reading. This happened to me when I recently read Inspired by Marty Cagan.
Roadmaps are ubiquitous. Everybody working in product development has encountered one. If you are a project manager, product owner, or product management professional you probably maintain one that you are using regularly to communicate timelines, priorities, and strategy. Also, you are likely unable to predict the future.
In its essence, agile product development is a mindset for dealing with an uncertain environment. The best way to do that is to find the path forward one step at a time. This means delivering frequently, observing how users react and interact with the product, and adjusting the approach for the next iteration according to the feedback and observations. Scrum is the manifestation of exactly this approach within a project management method.
The sprint planning meeting in Scrum is the ceremony that kicks off every sprint. If prepared correctly, it is the smoothest of all the Scrum meetings and sometimes takes no more than a few minutes. The planning can, however, also descend into chaos and be a huge source of discontent and frustration for the team.
Whenever I work with teams in product development, I have two main goals: create value for the user and make sure the team is happy. Though there are many more, I honestly believe that a happy team and value for the user are by far the most important. Everything else is downstream from those two.
The daily stand-up, daily scrum or simply the daily is the shortest of the Scrum ceremonies. If done right, the daily scrum is a very effective ceremony for removing issues, sharing information, team-building, and improving communication.
Along with the refinement, I find the sprint retrospective to be the most important ceremony within the Scrum Framework. It embodies one of the main features of agile product development, iterative improvements. This is, in my view, at the heart of agile product development. Iteratively improving not only applies to the product itself but also to the developmental process, the method of collaboration, and used frameworks.
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey is probably the book that had the most overall impact on my life. Other impactful books mostly touched my professional life. This one not only did that, but also changed my life outside of work. It impacted my character.
Creating a product vision is not overly complicated, if you keep three things in mind. Start with users, involve others, and write it down.
To me, there seem to be six characteristics that describe any well crafted product vision. Many more exist but the following stand out to me in describing what a compelling vision is.
