Automated testing appears to be essential for delivering high-quality, robust code, especially in an agile environment. It's pretty clear that high performing teams rely heavily on automated testing, and low quality teams don't. However, it's not clear that testing is the cause of robust
"Eating your own dog food" is a phrase that's been around a while in the tech industry, though it likely came from outside the industry. It's an important idea that you're building a tool for someone to use, which is supposedly better
Automated testing appears to be essential for delivering high-quality, robust code, especially in an agile environment. It's pretty clear that high performing teams rely heavily on automated testing, and low quality teams don't. However, it's not clear that testing is the cause of robust
There's a quote from Henry Ford that I really don't like: "If I asked customers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." And I don't like it for three reasons. First, he didn't say it, it's
Development work is blocked when a dependency for that work is unavailable. One of the great challenges in managing a project is identifying all the dependencies in the workflow so that all the work can be done in the order that prevents anyone from waiting for someone else to complete
By some estimations, the average lifespan of an enterprise application is about a decade. Forty years after the start of the personal computing revolution, a large portion of enterprise development is replacing legacy systems. The reasons for replacement vary, but two big reasons are the system cannot support the current
Aesthetics: a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. – Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary When designing a product how important are the aesthetics of the product? Is good design anything more than lipstick on a pig? Can the aesthetic
It's a common complaint that process interferes with getting work done, and if you ask a developer, they're likely to equate process with meetings. A quick scan of articles about agile written by developers will reveal a whole host of complaints, but everyone will uniformly complain
Complex systems are assemblies of components that interact according to a fixed set of rules to form a unified whole. Systems theory is the study of complex systems and encompasses perspectives from multiple disciplines. By definition, all digital products are complex systems, so the perspectives of systems theory can shed
Estimates seem to be the bane of software developers, many of whom would say that estimates are nothing but a waste of time. By observation, estimates are often misunderstood and misused. Developers and development managers in particular often resist providing a completion date, even with conditions, because they know that
There's really nothing like a committee to destroy progress and effectiveness within an organization. It's truly a mystery to me as to why companies establish committees to do anything, unless it's actually a nefarious plot to avoid doing things, but I'm reluctant
People avoid making decisions for many reasons, but mostly people avoid decisions to avoid the responsibility for the decision. There are four key components to an effective decision. A decision should solve a problem in a clear, sound, and timely manner. These components are best viewed from the perspective of
In 1987, Douglas Adams, most famously known as the author of the "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" trilogy, released a new book "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency." The book is quite entertaining, as is the show on BBC America by the
Since the start of the industrial revolution in the 18th century, standard approach to increasing the efficiency and profitability of business has been to standardize and automate systems and processes. Standardization and automation are pretty good tools, particularly for mechanical processes. But once you start looking at knowledge work and
Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure. — Melvin E. Conway This is Conway's Law, first introduced to the world in 1967. And, like many "natural laws," it's
Voltaire "Perfect is the enemy of good" is an adage attributed to Voltaire. It's certainly appropriate that a philosopher with concerns of aesthetics and quality should advance the idea. After all, nothing is ever perfect, and if you insist on only having what is perfect, you
"Eating your own dog food" is a phrase that's been around a while in the tech industry, though it likely came from outside the industry. It's an important idea that you're building a tool for someone to use, which is supposedly better
Bit Rot and Software Rot are observations digital content and software actually degrades over time, even though the software and content aren't physical. Of course, these things have to be stored on something, which will be physical and subject to degradation. But beyond the issues with storage media,
Like most dicta, finishing what you start is easy to say but hard to do. And we're aware of the difficulty both in our personal lives as well as in business. The reason is, like a dictum, it's always easier to talk about something in general
Some might consider incrementalism to be the ideal product development process. Given a product, all you need to do is focus on making the product incrementally better: add a feature, improve a feature, or reduce costs. Eventually, you'll get the product where it needs to go. Frequently, it
First jobs that most of us have involve manual labor and require little, if any, skill. These characteristics tend to go hand-in-hand of course. Without experience, there is no skill, and jobs that don't require any skill tend to be manual. My first paid jobs were mowing lawns
One spring, quite a while ago, I was driving to a client's office and stopped at a major intersection. Across the intersection, at the far side of a lot for a warehouse, maybe a quarter mile distant, I saw a few men standing at the corner of a
It's often said that the product manager is the CEO of the product. Unfortunately, most people don't really know what a CEO is supposed to do. Chief Executive Officer connotes a person in charge, telling people what to do and making lots of decisions. The person
As I discussed in another post, features are a great opportunity to motivate the team but are, instead, often written with wordy but shallow descriptions of desired functionality. In fact, it's worse. Most feature tickets are complete crap. After removing the wordy and shallow description, nothing is left.
In Start with Why, Simon Sinek states “Leadership requires two things: a vision of the world that does not yet exist and the ability to communicate it.” As a product manager or product owner you are the leader for your product. How much time do you spend buried in the
Most business processes are accidental: no person or team planned them out. Something needed to be done, and someone needed to do it. So it happened. Then the next day, week, month, or quarter, it had to be done again, and someone did it again. Maybe the same person, maybe
In The Mystery of Capital by Hernando de Soto, he laments of his fellow economists, "if economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn't go and look at the horses, They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘what would I do if I were
How do you rate yourself? Most of us are not good at answering this question, and psychology experiments indicate that we generally overrate ourselves. Anecdotally though, most product managers don't. Most product managers are aware of constantly shifting requirements, priorities, and expectations and often feel that they are