AI – Getting Familiar With A Swiss Army Knife

Doomscrolling through LinkedIn or any tech site these days, I often find myself completely overwhelmed by the flood of #AI posts. There is so much content to learn from and I can’t wrap my head around all the possible applications. It’s as if I was given a new Swiss army knife with sixteen funny looking […]

DORA Report 2024: Three Ideas to Tackle the Cons of Platform Usage

This year, the DORA report explored the topic of platform engineering. Overall, the impact of a platform is positive: Individuals were 8% more productive and teams performed 10% better when using an internal developer platform. Beyond productivity, we also see gains when a platform is used in an organization’s overall performance, with an increase of […]

Product Owners (What are they Good For?)

Absolutely nothing! That would be a fitting first sentence for this blog post. But if this is the case why are we (myself included) still around? Here are some reasons that make the Product Owner role an absolute “must” in some organisations and some ideas if you are interested in changing that. Feature granularity Imagine […]

Three Ingredients for Tasty Platform Capabilities

Last week, Manuel Pais and Laura Tacho discussing platform success they said: Figure out what your company cares about. How to Structure Your Platform Team What the company cares about is the impact that you want your platform to create. It can be saving money, faster releases or something completely different. But sometimes, even if […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Are we Done? Really Done?

A couple of weeks ago I had a discussion with my manager whether we can set an initiative that we worked on to “Completed”. We had developed our part and handed it over to another team to consume the changes. But there were good chances that they would come back to us with further suggestions, […]