When you have a Product Vision, you know what you’re standing for and you know what you’re not. You know what your product is going to look like and what it is not. If that doesn’t convince you why do you need a product vision: A Product Vision also guides your product strategy and aligns the team behind it. What is a product vision? A product vision is a description of the essence of your product. It is a statement that describes why your product exists and what differentiates your product from other similar products on the market. Your vision is a big picture of a product that will guide you to build your MVP or what’s your product like …

Why do I need a Product Vision? Read more »

Your technical debt is product debt and product debt is business debt! Start giving your technical debt the attention it deserves or it will punish you later. Technical debt is business debt, the funds are just not borrowed from a bank but taken from engineers. This sounds provokative? Read further because tech debt is business debt! What is technical debt? The term was coined by Ward Cunningham, who said “If we failed to make our program align with what we then understood to be the proper way to think about our financial objects, then we were going to continue to stumble on that disagreement which is like paying interest on a loan.”. Further he added “Shipping first-time code is like …

Pay back time… tech debt is business debt! Read more »

Measuring and using velocity of an agile team can be helpful in forecasting output of the near future. You need a certain stability in your team and enough data points / iterations. However, there are also things that could go wrong using velocity. Therefore I want to shed some light on pitfalls using velocity in agile planning. Velocity is not a measure for productivity! Velocity is only an indicator of how much work was done in the past, not how much work will be done in the future. It’s like measuring your running speed with a stopwatch and then using this value to predict how fast you can run tomorrow or next week. We would be able to predict who will …

Velocity pitfalls to be aware of Read more »

The role of the product owner comes with a lot of responsibility and things you supposed to do. However, there are also things that you shouldn’t do. This post brings attention to 5 Product Owner anti-patterns that you should avoid as they either harm your product or your team. Not being able to make decisions This is probably the number one anti-pattern for a product owner. As the product owner, it is your responsibility to make decisions that will move your product forward. This includes making tough calls and sometimes disappointing stakeholders. If you are not able to make decisions, you will quickly find yourself bogged down in analysis paralysis and your team will lose confidence in you. Making decisions …

5 Product Owner anti-patterns to escape from Read more »