Tag: Product Management

Slow Work Needs Time

Some work is not meant to be done quickly and not meant to be done by a specific date either.

It is not unreasonable to expect output and results in time to be able to progress, but slow work needs time.

Pin a deadline on or timebox an activity and be prepared to make trade offs.

Trade offs could mean less than ideal.
Perhaps “less than ideal” is what’s needed for the work to be done.

Also…

'When will it be done' is an unanswerable question. However, 'what’s the probability of satisfying our strategic goals by this date at this cost' is both answerable and a reasonable ask as long as specific details of 'how' aren’t fixed.
— Allen Holub (@allenholub) September 8, 2021

For an even longer (much longer) read, check out Driving engineers to an arbitrary date is a value destroying mistake from Gandalf Hudlow on iiSM.org

Tags Product Management

Measuring Outcome

What is the measure of an outcome in an organisation?
Is it a tick in the box?
Is it a business relevant metric?

Metrics are too often mistaken for a tick in the box.

Metrics are hard, measuring them is even harder.
Moving the needle on a metric that counts is an achievement.
Recognising people, teams, divisions, entire organisations for results is leadership.

A tick in the box has never delivered any real value.
A tick in a box has never transformed a business.
What kind of culture does giving credit for a ticking the box drive?

If your daily work involves ticking boxes, send a link to this article to your superiors.

Tags Leadership, Product Management

Engineering Product Management

On Measuring

Post author By Peter
Post date 2021-12-11
No Comments on On Measuring

Measuring code quality, productivity, technical debt is difficult.

Measuring number of lines of code; speed of delivering code; completed stories, features, epics is easy.

Do not trade quality away for comfort.

Tags Leadership, Product Management, Technical debt

Engineering Product Management

Is it Serious?

Transpiling a good doctor-patient joke to techie-CEO:

CEO says to one of his techie “Is it serious? How long do we have until we go offline?”
Techie says “5”
CEO says “5 what? 5 days? 5 weeks? 5 months?”
Techie says “4…”

Tags Fun, Product Management

Engineering Product Management

You call yourself a SaaS?

Post author By Peter
Post date 2021-10-29
No Comments on You call yourself a SaaS?

You do not get to call your product a Software as a Service (SaaS) if it does not support webhooks or REST hooks in addition to a decent collection of APIs.

Your product is just web application.