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 […]

Memories of Agile Testing Days 2017

Back in 2017, I wrote an internal blog post about my first visit at Agile Testing Days, called “Are Testers Obsolete? Spoiler Alert, They Aren’t”. Besides the occasional obsolete link, my inability to find the reference to the images (if they are yours please let me know), and my shifting away from testing I still […]

Trying Out the New GitHub Projects

I have been a huge fan of project management with GitHub issues since about 2013. There are two things that make it really appealing to me: The proximity to the code and the overwhelming simplicity that forced you to stay honest when you set up your process. Of course, the lack of a Kanban board […]

Overcoming the Fear of Talking to Users – Learning about the Product

As I wrote in my previous post I am not very comfortable talking to our end users. What helps me become more confident, is to have a better understanding of what I am actually talking about. To that effect, I started analysing our product to find out how its individual parts are working. Here is […]

Overcoming the Fear of Talking to Users

When I got my first position as a product owner, it didn’t take me long to start contacting our users. I was eager to find out what they were doing and how our tool could benefit them. My calendar was full of meetings and there were more opportunities to explore than the day was long. […]

Small Tips for Organising GitHub Labels

When it comes to project management tools, my favourite is GitHub issues. I find them simple to use and I like the issue-code proximity. Since adding a label to a repository is so easy, you might lose oversight of all the labels you have and why you have them. Here are some tips for anyone […]

Small Wins: The Little Things that Make our Days

Every now and then, I like taking note of all the small things that make my days at work a bit better.

Returning to the Office

A couple of weeks ago I went back to the office after 14 months. Entering the building I met two colleagues I talk to on the phone all the time. And yet, meeting them in flesh and blood I had no idea what to say. I mumbled something weird and quickly rushed to my desk. […]

My Product Owner Onboarding Checklist

When I started working as a Product Owner in the beginning of 2020, I didn’t know where to begin. There were the challenges of fitting in with the team as well as adapting to the new role. But besides that, there was simply too much to learn. To get started, I created a checklist of […]