The Role Roadmaps Play in Managing Product Design
In modern software development, product designers tend to be embedded on a cross-functional squad or scrum team. That team’s collective work is often represented,...
Category Agile & Development
How to Support a Change Management Process Using Roadmaps
Change is hard. It’s an uphill battle against the familiar, the routine, complacency, and inertia. Even when people agree, change is needed. Figuring out...
Your Dev Squads Shouldn’t Be Hitting 100% of Their Sprint Goals
Goals are a good thing. Without setting goals, we have don’t know what we’re trying to accomplish and have no real way to measure...
What Does a Lead Engineer at ProductPlan Do in a Day?
I’m writing for the first time on the ProductPlan blog! Long time reader, first time writer. I’m currently a remote Lead Software Engineer at...
I’m Predictable in an Agile Environment
“Being Agile” and “being predictable” may seem mutually exclusive, at least when it comes to product management. A good sprint cadence creates a predictable...
When to Declare Backlog Bankruptcy
A few years ago, I was the acting product manager at a startup, developing an enterprise software product. Building the product was hard: it...
4 Project Management Tools Product Managers Love
Project managers are responsible for executing the plans handed off from product management. This hand-off means delivering on schedule and obligatory herding of cats...
Building Your Roadmap with Cybersecurity in Mind
Security is someone else’s problem. It’s up to IT. The developers will handle it. We use AWS or Azure, so we’re cool. We use...
5 Things All IT Managers Should Do to Get Stakeholder Buy-In
Implementing a successful enterprise architecture (EA) transformation requires stakeholder buy-in. Hearing that may make you frustrated and worried about the time-cost invested. But it’s...
How to Make a Compelling IT Services Roadmap
Let’s face it, IT Services doesn’t get the glory it deserves. Most large organizations would quickly grind to a halt without the shepherding and...
When Your Sprint Planning Meeting Goes Off the Rails
Ask a room full of agile product managers what comes out of a sprint planning meeting, and most will list two things. The sprint...
Why Enterprise Architects Need to Be Great Storytellers
Leaders in technical organizations that want to advance their agendas must be able to communicate a strong vision and rationale for their implementation and...
Don’t Let Technology Changes Turn into Technical Debt
Technological evolution doesn’t stop. It doesn’t go on vacation, it doesn’t take a victory lap, it rarely even pauses long enough to catch a...
Tips for Communicating with IT Stakeholders
Most of the time, the IT department lurks quietly in the background, humming along supporting business systems and rarely attracting attention unless something’s gone...
Managing Products that Lose Money
It should be counterintuitive, but one thing many “unicorns” and scrappy startups have in common is a whole lot of red on their balance...
Feature Flags: A Product Manager’s Best Friend
Today, software development is all about the need for speed. Feature updates, UI changes and bug fixes are all done in near real time,...
The Definition of Done: What Product Managers Need to Know
Are we there yet? This is a difficult question to answer when no one agrees on where exactly “there” is. In an Agile world...
Scalable Decision Making: How Product Teams can Make Group Decisions at Scale
Nothing slows down progress like indecision. When a lone individual is responsible for making a decision, they may stall, worrying about the consequences of...
How Do Roadmaps Fit into Continuous Delivery?
When you’re continually shipping code, how do you plan, build, and communicate your roadmap? In this post, we’ll outline the basics of continuous delivery,...
3 Things Product Managers Owe to Internal Constituents
If you’re a product manager, then you probably have a lot on your plate. Meeting deadlines. Making customers happy. Keeping your team on track…all...
4 Companies that Successfully Scaled Product Quickly
Leading a product team during a high-growth period can be exciting. The team grows, roles shift, output increases, and many other pivotal changes happen...
5 Key Responsibilities of Agile Product Leaders
What does product leadership look like in an agile context? And, how is it different from leadership in traditional development environments? For the product...
What Does the Agile Roadmapping Process Look Like in Practice?
In today’s article, we’ll discuss the agile roadmapping process. We’ll start by reviewing the objectives of roadmaps and planning for agile teams, then share...
Why Technical Debt Roadmaps Don’t Work
To understand the problem with technical debt roadmaps, we’ll start with a quote from renowned philosopher, Homer Simpson. “If you have a problem, ignore...
