InfoQ Homepage Product Development Content on InfoQ
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Sustainability for Software Companies: Reducing Impact by Deciding What Not to Do
Small and medium-sized companies can contribute to sustainability with emissions reduction, mental health offerings and inclusion. To support sustainability, software engineers can think about “what not to do” to reduce complexity and make solutions smaller, resulting in a smaller carbon footprint.
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Getting Feedback When Your Colleagues Are Also Your Customers
Getting and using feedback from colleagues who are also customers using your product can improve the quality of the product and help to improve the way of working. In this situation, it’s easier to receive feedback, but you can get overloaded by it.
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Measuring the Environmental Impact of Software and Cloud Services
Software has an influence on the limitation of the service life or the increased energy consumption. It’s possible to measure the environmental impacts that are caused by cloud services. The design of the software architecture determines how much hardware and electrical power is required. Software can be economical or wasteful with hardware resources.
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Migrating a Monolith towards Microservices with the Strangler Fig Pattern
ScholarPack has migrated away from its monolith backend using a Strangler Fig pattern. They applied incremental development and continuous delivery to target customers’ needs, in the meanwhile strangling their monolith.
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Taking Advantage of Attitudes for Building Products
Attitudes like cynicism, skepticism and optimism impact how we develop products. Being aware of attitude matters, as it can block development or lead to building the wrong product. InfoQ interviewed Gwen Diagram about cynicism, skepticism, and optimism, the impact developers can have, and dealing with attitudes in teams.
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Camille Fournier on Effectively Managing Internal Platform Teams
Camille Fournier, managing director, head of platform engineering for Two Sigma, recently shared her learnings from managing internal platform engineering teams. Two of the key challenges she shares are the smaller size of the customer base and the challenge in understanding how your customers will use your product.
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Effective Product Development for the 2020s
Ram Sivasankaran examined the market failures of Google’s social media attempts, Kodak and Blockbusters. His analysis identified slow adoption of technology, a lack of data-driven decision-making and low customer focus. Martin Reeves and Bill Lydon have also both written about a more competitive market in the 2020s, requiring the adoption of product strategies which embrace emergent technologies.
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Becoming Outcome Focused: Q&A with Jeff Patton
We need to become focused on outcomes and adapt our way of thinking and our processes to continuously release small changes to our products and services, argued Jeff Patton in the closing keynote at the Agile Greece Summit 2019.
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Lessons Learned from Innovating at Google: Frame the Problem, Use Data, and Define the MVP
The truly great, innovative, useful ideas come mostly from two sources: your target users, and people working in the organization - not necessarily those with a "product manager" hat. Experimentation can help us to materialize ideas into actual products and technology. Framing the problem, using data, and defining the MVP can help us to increase the chance of success in innovation.
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Design Sprints at LEGO: Q&A with Eik Thyrsted Brandsgård
Design sprints have led to a high level of energy and motivation at LEGO. You need to discuss the ideas and learnings coming out of each sprint to decide if there’s a solution or if you need to go deeper in the next sprint. Design sprints have created a sense of pride; a belief that teams can tackle any challenge, and the feeling that individuals can add value that exceeds their expected roles.
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Applying Artificial Intelligence in the Agile World
The convergence of artificial intelligence (AI) systems with the agile world is having a disruptive effect on how we build software and the types of products that we build, said Aidan Casey. By combining machine learning and deep learning we can build applications that truly learn like humans. AI bias is a very serious concern, as AI systems are only as good as the data sets used to train them.
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Building Services at Scale at Airbnb: QCon London Q&A
The re-architecture to SOA at Airbnb improved the performance of the services and site reliability. Faster build and deploy times led to increased developer productivity, and improving clarity and boundaries for ownership increased efficiency. Jessica Tai, a software engineer at Airbnb, presented Airbnb’s Great Migration: Building Services at Scale at QCon London 2019.
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The Customer is Not Always Right and Neither Are You
At the recent Agile 2018 conference, Natalie Warnert gave a talk titled "The Customer is Not Always Right, and Neither Are You!” in which she gave the audience thought-provoking concepts on how to make sure we are building the right thing. She presented three traps that teams fall into - incorrect customer, premature solution and drowning in data, and provided advice on how to avoid them.
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How No and Low Code Approaches Support Business Users and Professional Developers
No code approaches aim to support business users in developing and maintaining their own applications, where low code simplifies the developer’s work and makes them more productive. Both approaches enable faster development at lower costs. As the distinction between these approaches is becoming smaller, business users and developers can team up and use them together.
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The Three Habits of Highly Effective Product People
Kent McDonald, agile practitioner acting mostly on the product field and co-author of the book “Stand Back and Deliver: Accelerating Business Agility”, recently gave a webinar in which he talked about several techniques to improve and being successful when practicing Product Ownership at Distance, and described which for him are the "Three Habits of Highly Effective Product People".