Jock Busuttil's Blog: I Manage Products, page 33

72: All the world’s a stage

Jacques to Duke Senior

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.

William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII

The other day, I was asked how to launch a product successfully. Two competing responses sprang to mind: the way I would have answered a couple of decades ago and the way I actually suggested.

The old way of launching a product

When I f...

Q&A: What’s the best way to focus teams on outcomes not outputs?

I’m asked questions about product management from time to time. Here’s one I’ve answered recently:

What’s the best way to help agile teams move away from feature delivery to focus on outcome over output?

From my experience, the elephant in the room seems to often be we don’t know enough about the problem and we haven’t done enough research. The team is eager to build stuff and are clearly worried about the unknown of the discovery process.

How can we get better at doing research to find opportu...

Upcoming live talks – July 2020

I’ll be giving a couple of live talks this month in Sweden and Australia. Unsurprisingly, I’m giving them virtually. So while I won’t have the pleasure of seeing lovely people and far-off places in person, this gives you the opportunity to listen in.

Read on for talk details and how to attend.

Tuesday 21st July: ProductBeats Weekly Webinar

Tolpagorni runs ProductBeats, a community of product people based in Stockholm, Sweden. I’ve known their Founder and CEO Magnus Billgren for ...

Upcoming live talks

I’ll be giving a couple of live talks this month in Sweden and Australia. Unsurprisingly, I’m giving them virtually. So while I won’t have the pleasure of seeing lovely people and far-off places in person, this gives you the opportunity to listen in.

Read on for talk details and how to attend.

Tuesday 21st July: ProductBeats Weekly Webinar

Tolpagorni runs ProductBeats, a community of product people based in Stockholm, Sweden. I’ve known their Founder and CEO Magnus Billgren for ...

Q&A: What’s the name for ‘continuing to find product-market fit’?

I’m asked questions about product management from time to time. Here’s one I’ve answered recently:

Do you have a term/name for continuing to find/refine product-market fit?

Or is product-market fit something you find once and then ignore after you found it?

Is there a term you’ve run into that talks about it as an ongoing process? Specifically as it relates to innovation or disruption (market changes).

DM

In my view, product-market fit is a bit of a moving target for a few reasons:

Ear...

Reading aloud

71: The PMO strikes back

Sometimes I feel that each time product management practice evolves to empower and trust delivery teams more, there’s a corresponding response from the world of bureaucracy and red tape to re-establish oversight and enforce a rigid, one-size-fits-none process.

Okay, okay, so maybe likening the Project Management Office (PMO) to the Empire hunting down the Rebel Alliance is perhaps a teensy bit combative. But it’s how I feel sometimes. Just don’t let my desire for a weak pun give you the wrong...

What does a product manager do (and not do)?

Compared to when I started out in product management, we’re a lot better at defining the role of a product manager. It’s always worth a reminder, so I’d like to share with you a talk I gave last summer, What does a product manager do (and not do)?

In the talk I answer the following questions:

What is a product?
What is product management?
What does a product manager do?
What does a product manager not do?
Why do we need product management?
What makes a good product manager?

Have a watch! Ther...

70: You need a delivery manager on your team

In the UK government digital teams, you don’t see project managers or even Scrum masters. Why? Because they have delivery managers instead. In this article, I’m going to convince you why you need delivery managers on your teams.

Not a project manager

Imagine a project manager: their role is to keep the project team on track, on time and on budget, to enforce the process, and to communicate progress and seek help from above when the team is blocked.

Now imagine them evolving from a role centred ...

May you live in interesting times

Even if its not actually an ancient (or modern) Chinese curse1, the saying is well understood. Author Arthur C. Clarke wrote in 1965:

As the old Chinese curse has it: May you live in interesting times, and the twentieth century is probably the most interesting period mankind has ever known.

The following year, Robert F. Kennedy referred to the same saying in a speech, adding:

Like it or not, we live in interesting times. They are times of danger and uncertainty; but they are also the most...