How Product Management can Improve Development Experience

Last week, Abi Noda (DX), Dr. Storey (University of Victoria), Dr. Forsgren (Microsoft Research) and Dr. Greiler (DX) published an article on development productivity, identifying three core dimensions of developer experience that have a direct effect on it. I find that Product Management practices largely affect these three dimensions and it is worth writing down some […]

Care Tips for Product Plans

A category of articles I enjoy reading, are the ones describing the differences between “product roadmaps” and “product plans”/”release plans”/”backlog”. Even if they are entities we deal with regularly in software development, the range of definitions and explanations around them is irregularly big. Last one that caught my eye was by Saeed Khan, a seasoned […]

Developer Collaboration Practices

I am not a developer myself, but for the past ten years I am working in development teams doing one thing or another. Over time, I have seen that one of the factors that makes a team effective is that we need to bring everyone along (if you are interested, you can find the other […]

Intentionally “Failing” the DORA Metrics

Many of us evaluating our DevOpsishness, have one time or another, answered how well we were doing based on the four metrics defined by the DORA research. Deployment Frequency — How often an organization successfully releases to production Lead Time for Changes —The amount of time it takes a commit to get into production Change […]

Five Guardrails to Build Up the Confidence to Release

I won’t lie. Every time we release something new to our users, I get stressed. Will they like it? Will they use it? Did we miss something? Did we break something we didn’t expect? And over the years, in order to relieve my anxiety, I often wondered: How can we measure the quality of a […]

Five Tips for Effective Teams

Time after time, whenever I start working in a new team, I find myself gravitating towards the same five practices. I find that once they are in place, our day-to-day work seems to become smoother. Single backlog for all work items One of the first things I do when I start in a new place […]

Prerequisites for Teams Without Testers

For the past three years I am working in development teams that don’t employ a professional tester. Even though there are skills I miss working without testers, still these teams manage to deliver software in good quality. Nudged by a Twitter conversation, I started thinking what were the things that needed to be in place […]

Being an Unremarkable Content Creator

From time to time I get asked why I named this blog “uneremarkabletester” or why my Twitter handler is “unremarkableQA”. The first reason is obviously lack of any knowledge of good branding principles. The second one is that I strongly believe that not all of us are remarkable at what we do but it is […]

From Internal Tools to Internal Platforms: Getting Started

As a product owner of an internal development tool part of my job was to talk to developers to find out how our tool could help them in their day-to-day work. To identify developers’ needs and provide solutions to them by means of our tool. And we were doing pretty well, I must say. Our […]

Pair Product Management

Pair programming is by now a quite well known development technique. Developers that have tried it out and chose to go with it, report that they learn more, feel more productive and in general get more satisfaction out of their work. Since I am not a developer I thought I would never be able to […]

Product Owners Participating in Daily: Some Benefits

Even though the team I work in does not do Scrum, we do have a daily short get-together (our Daily) where we give each other an update on the topics we are working on. It’s pretty close to the definition of a Daily Scum. The purpose of the Daily Scrum is to inspect progress toward […]

Skills I Miss Working Without Testers

For the past two years I am the Product Owner in teams that don’t have a dedicated tester. Within the team, we discuss in depth the implications of anything new we plan to develop and test before releasing a feature. Everyone has the best interest of our end users in mind and we all strive […]

Balancing Between Stream-Aligned and Enabling Teams

Over the years, swinging back and forth between positions, I found myself often thinking of Charity Major’s The Engineer/Manager Pendulum blog post. The best frontline eng managers in the world are the ones that are never more than 2-3 years removed from hands-on work, full time down in the trenches. The best individual contributors are the […]

Two Things I Practised in 2021

As the year is coming to an end, I started looking back at the things that helped me in my day-to-day work in 2021. I found that two particular ideas were always in the back of my head, stirring my actions and improving what I did. Thought I shared them in case they can help […]

Overcoming the Fear of Talking to Users – Understanding the Background

A couple of weeks ago I wrote down the reasons that make me uncomfortable talking to our users, as well as how I try to overcome them by analysing how our tool works. Soon I realised that just by looking at the situation as it is today that didn’t help me much understand why it […]