InfoQ Homepage Product Management Content on InfoQ
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How Continuous Discovery Helps Software Teams to Take Product Decisions
Continuous discovery for product development is regular research that involves the entire software product team, and that can actively inform product decisions. Equating continuous discovery to weekly conversations with one or more customers can be misleading. Combining quantitative and qualitative research methods can help software teams gather data and understand what is behind the data.
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Platform Engineering Challenges: Small Teams, Build Versus Buy, and Building the Wrong Thing
The team at Syntasso wrote a series of blog posts outlining twelve challenges that platform teams face. These challenges include having a small platform team support a large organization, failing to understand the needs of the platform users, and struggling with the build-vs-buy argument.
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State of DevOps Report Finds Platform Teams Lacking Product Management Support
Puppet released the 2023 State of DevOps Report with a focus on Platform Engineering. The report found that organizations with platform engineering teams report increased developer velocity, improvements in system reliability, greater productivity, and better workflow standards. Organizations still need to work on adopting a product mindset with the platform teams.
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Using Data to Predict Future Usage and Increase User Insights
By identifying usage trends, you can proactively adjust load, scaling, and routing to better handle the load on particular parts of the globe when you know it will peak there. Data about how users interact with your application can be used to design future features that better mimic these patterns and ensure that new features have a better chance of solving real user problems and getting adopted.
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The Future is Knowable before it Happens: an Impossible Thing for Developers
In software development there are always things that we don’t know. We can take time to explore knowable unknowns, to learn them and get up to speed with them. To deal with unknowable unknowns, a solution is to be more experimental and hypothesis-driven in our development. Kevlin Henney gave a keynote about Six Impossible Things at QCon London 2022 and at QCon Plus May 10-20, 2022.
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How to Foster Startup-Like Innovation in Established Companies
Startup founders expect uncertainty and failure as part of their innovation process. Leaders in established companies need to make sure that people take on risks to build the next big thing. Adding small improvements to products in a constant manner will create a compounding effect over time, and will help you build the exact thing your users are looking for.
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How Testers Can Contribute to Product Definition
Utilizing the tester’s feedback during product definition and design is valuable for the business. Listening to the organization's needs, understanding the business goals, and customizing the test process by incorporating different skills and practices is one way testing can begin while the product is still "on paper".
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Virtualizing Design Sprint and UX Workshops
Design sprint and UX workshops can be done virtually using a combination of remote whiteboards and communication platforms. It brings advantages like being able to invite international experts, having remote participants attend, less travelling, smaller carbon footprint, and lower costs.
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Product Owner Is a Bad Bad Idea
The question of whether the product owner role is good or not clearly depends on a lot of factors, including team maturity, organisational maturity, organisational type, organisational complexity, and the product owner themselves. Some thought leaders are challenging the function of the role especially in these VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) times.
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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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How to Scale Pilots into a Global IT Organization
Scaling pilots into a global IT organization is doable, and if done right, it really works and can help to transform entire companies, said Clemens Utschig. At DevOpsCon Munich 2019 he presented how they go from starting with an idea to scaling it up into the global organization.
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Digital Factory on a Global Scale: Scaled Agile and DevOps at UBS
UBS is rolling out a scaled agile setup globally in Switzerland, India and the APAC region. Christian Bucholdt, head IT of digital factory management at UBS, spoke at Agile Leadership Day 2019 about their Digital Factory approach and how it will change the entire delivery organization.
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Product Thinking: Q&A with Jeff Patton
Product thinking focuses on outcomes to maximize the success of your customers, argued Jeff Patton in the closing keynote at the Agile Greece Summit 2019. The things that make a product good are results of customers seeing, trying and using your product; they happen after you ship it. Product delivery is the beginning, not the end.
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Creating an Online Platform for Refugees Using Lean Startup
What do you do if you want to reach a new user group whose complex needs you need to learn about quickly? At Agile Business Day 2019, Stephanie Gasche shared her experience using lean startup methods to create an online platform, without financial support, for the integration of refugees and asylum seekers.
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Lessons from an Ex-Project Manager Turned Product Manager
To survive as a product manager, you need to put strategy first and be able to balance it alongside being heavily involved in delivery. All ideas need testing, and you need to truly listen to your customers to deeply understand their problems, said Emma Sephton. She shared her lessons learned from becoming a product manager at the Agile Greece Summit 2019.