Phillip Starke
How to deal with an organization that has no interest in helping a new (Scrum) team succeed
5 ways to deal with the challenge of attempting to establish a Scrum team (actually any new team) within an existing organization.
Category Project Leader
Clearing the confusion: product manager vs. project manager vs. product owner vs. program manager
Product Manager, Project Manager, Product Owner, Program Manager: a lot of managers, a lot of words that start with the letters Pr. Maybe that is at the heart of why so many people seem to confuse the roles. They all…
The two keys to building a successful, empowered Scrum team
Let’s be honest, many companies do not implement the best practices of agile, lean, or other frameworks as they were intended. Organizations, human nature, and processes get in the way of the best intentions. Thus, companies often end up with…
Leading indicators – easy to understand but hard to master in practice
The core of agile development - it should be at the heart of all product development efforts for that matter - is iteratively moving forward. We need to understand the impact of what we are doing without waiting for too long. For this reason, Product teams need to use leading indicators so that they can immediately measure the effectiveness of their product development.
Why typical product roadmaps fail – how to overcome their flaws
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.
The importance of a happy team (and 5 tips on creating one)
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.
Three essential reasons for creating a compelling product vision
A product vision is of paramount importance. This seems to be a given. You can find a lot of material that simply states this as fact without explaining why this is the case. Many write about what a vision is and plenty of folks provide frameworks or methods for creating a product vision. However, rarely do they explain why the product vision is needed, what the reasons are for creating one. It seems to simply be assumed that everybody already knows. Why is it so important?
Kanban – a simple, flexible, and effective way to organize product development
Besides Scrum, Kanban is probably the most prevalent system for managing workflow in agile product development. It is a very flexible system, with little overhead. As such, Kanban is very easy to implement. Many enjoy the feeling of flow that results from using a Kanban system.
How to make user value the focus of building great products
I have realized that the distinction between different types of value created in product development is very important. For long term success the value to end users needs to be (back) in the center.
Our unreasonable hope that software tools will magically save us
Don´t get me wrong, many software tools are fantastic products. I use a wide variety daily. However, I feel like their impact is overvalued. Or maybe, to put it better, I think they are misused. Far too often is some new license for a tool purchased because “we are not meeting our targets”. The hope is then that the tool magically solves everything. Spoiler alert: It doesn't.