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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

Decoupling Deployments from Releases: in Other People’s Words

One of the discussions I keep on having is how practices like Continuous Delivery can jeopardise quality, not allowing enough time for “proper testing”. If every code change can be deployed to production how can we possibly know if the end user experience will remain good? A technique for maintaining a certain level of quality […]

Balancing the Quality Scale

Huib Schoots and Joost Voskuil, had the idea to bring together people with an interest in Quality and ask them questions like “How can you sell Quality?” and “What limitations or barriers do you hit?”. On January 30th, 2021 the first (of many?) Quality Acceleration Peer Conference took place and I was lucky enough to […]

Shifting my Quality Perspective: From a Quality to a Product Owner Role

Not having the word “quality” in my job description is something new for me. I went from “Quality Engineer”, to “Quality Product Accountable”, to “Quality Coach”, always being directly involved in the quality of the product or the process. Now as a product owner I am trying to figure out what is my role in […]

First Challenges as a New Product Owner

Imagine it’s your first day at a new school and you are asked to join the basketball team as their captain and coach. Everyone is playing along nicely when you show up, the new kid. You have been playing basketball for some time but you never had any decision making position before. And now here […]