Does the shoemaker’s son always go barefoot?
This is an expression that we normally say when the family of a skilled or knowledgeable person is often the last to benefit from her expertise. One of the topics I talk about most with my clients, to the point …
Downsizing and layoffs
During my 30+ years leading teams in technology companies, I have seen and felt the effects of some crises and recessions. According to Wikipedia, since 1990, there have been 4 US recessions, the most recent being COVID-19 in early 2020. …
Happy 2023!!!
First of all, I wish you a happy 2023!!! I hope that this year we continue to advance in our learning about how to make digital products and that, with this learning, we manage to make even better products! To …
Defining Responsibilities
In the chapter What is the difference between product marketing and product management? I commented on how marketing 4Ps (Product, Price, Promotion, and Place) are distributed between product marketing and product managers. This is a macro view of the division …
The main reason why products fail
If we search on Google for reasons why tech products fail, we will find many articles with many possible reasons explaining product failures. From 3 of these articles, I was able to compile a list of 26 reasons: And the …
Relationship between product management and the other areas
In previous chapters, I discussed the relationship between the product manager and engineering, UX, product marketing, and project management. The question that remains is: what about the other areas of the company? How is the product manager’s relationship with operations, …
Discovery is not a process
It’s pretty common for people who are new to product development to think that product discovery is a process, but we need to understand that’s incorrect. The correct definition is: Product discovery is a set of tools to help us …
How to turn a feature team into a product team?
After reading my last article on the differences between a feature team and a product team, one may realize how valuable a product team is and may ask herself what we need to do to turn a feature team into …
Feature Team vs Product Team
I’ve already written about the difference between solution-implementing teams and problem-solving teams. I’ve also written about the #1 responsibility of a product manager, which is to deliver results as fast as possible. However, as these are very important topics for …
We deal with people’s money, we don’t have room for errors
When I talk about the release early and often behavior of successful product companies during in-company trainings or in-company talks, some people mention that their business is too risky and they don’t have room for errors. For instance, a bank …
New product: in-company training
Now that I’m a full-time product leadership coach, I’ve managed to design a product that I believe will help many companies and their product development teams connect business and technology to generate more and more results for both the company …
Product Operations
Product Operations, or POps as some people have called it, is a role that has appeared with some frequency in product development teams, especially in reasonably large teams with 150 or more people, including engineers, designers and product managers. Definitions …
First group to finish the Product Vision and Strategy Workshop
Yesterday the first group of product leaders finished the Product Vision and Strategy Workshop, where we discussed concepts and tools to help create a sound vision and strategy for a digital product, and then they created and presented to the …
What is the difference between project management and product management?
As with the functions of product marketing and product management which, as we saw in the previous chapter, are quite distinct but overlapping, project management and product management functions are also quite distinct, but they also have a lot in …
Should we have a dedicated bug fixing team?
Similar to the question about the dedicated innovation team, this is another question I’ve been receiving a lot in my coaching sessions, so its answer may also be of interest to more people. In this case, the short answer is …
Should we have a dedicated innovation team?
This is a question I’ve been receiving a lot in my coaching sessions, so its answer may be of interest to more people. The short answer is “no and yes” which, I know, doesn’t answer much. It is the famous …
Only 7% of companies have digitally savvy leadership
That’s one of the findings of a study done by MIT Sloan researchers from CISR (Center for Information Systems Research) and published in the Spring 2021 edition of the MIT Sloan Management Review. The study was made with almost 17,000 …
Full-time product leadership coach
3 months ago I announced that I was ending my full-time executive role leading Lopes’s digital transformation efforts, and I was still figuring out my focus moving forward. I’m very fortunate to have had an amazing journey, full of learning …
How to measure a company’s digital maturity?
In my last article, I discussed the digital maturity of a company, which means how much the company has been investing in digital products to potentialize its results and how much the results have been actually potentialized by digital efforts. …
Type of company vs digital maturity
When I described what is a product, I also described the 3 types of companies that can own digital products and the impact of the type of the company on the role of the product manager in the organization that …
What is the difference between product marketing and product management?
Outside the technology and software industry, it is common to find the product marketing function as one of the product management functions. That is, product management is seen as part of marketing, so much so that the term product management …
UX and product management
The next area I want to comment on is the UX area which, along with product engineering and product management, forms the core product development team. What is UX? User Experience The “user experience” encompasses all aspects of end user …
3 digital transformation lessons from Disney
Q2 2022 results from Netflix and Disney showed Disney with more streaming subscribers than Netflix. The chart below shows how the numbers evolved until this amazing milestone: This is an interesting case of an incumbent company, Disney, being able to …
When to define, revise and communicate your product vision and strategy?
Some of my clients have been bringing the need to discuss the topics of product vision, strategy, team structure, and OKRs. Not only discuss how to define them but also when to define, revise and communicate them. What are they …
Engineering and product management
How should the product manager relate to different areas of the company? Engineering, UX, product marketing, project management, operations, sales, legal, finance, customer service, human resources, and general management. Recalling what I said in the chapter Main characteristics of a …
What is the ideal team size?
In the chapter about team structure from my book Digital Product Leadership, I gave some real-life examples of team size from Gympass, Conta Azul, and Locaweb. However, one thing that is not in that chapter is how we defined the …
Do product managers need to know how to code?
This is a somewhat controversial question. I’ve been seeing some interesting debates on this topic on Linkedin and WhatsApp groups in the Brazilian product management community so I want to share my experience on this topic. I have already shared …
End of life
Your digital product may have arrived here coming from three different paths: Your product growth has slowed, and you have done all the analysis and testing described in the previous chapter to make sure that it has indeed reached the …
Maturity
After the innovation phase, assuming your product made it through the abyss, it came to growth. But there will come a time when your product will enter the maturity phase. This is inevitable, we just need to review the S …
In praise of the incomplete leader
It’s very difficult, if not impossible, to be a complete leader. And that’s ok!!! Just to be clear, by complete I mean good at everything that a team needs a leader to be good at. That’s not to say that …
Product management in a crisis
There are several types of crisis. It can be a crisis in the company, a crisis in the economy, or a crisis in health, like the COVID-19 crisis. Crises shake the company, its customers, and the products the company offers …
Putting it all together – vision, strategy, roadmap and OKRs
In the previous chapter about the growth phase of the product lifecycle, I described a set of 4 tools that will be of great support for your digital product management work when used together: Vision: is the reason why the …
Delivery date is another source of conflict between business and tech
In the same that discovery seems to be a source of conflict between business people and product development teams, as I explained in the article Why business people hate discovery, the term delivery date also seems to generate some conflicts. …
What is and how to create the product vision and strategy?
At some point during the growth phase of your product, it may be helpful to create its vision and strategy. These tools will greatly help you in the decisions about what the future of your product will be. For this …
Growth: thoughts on metrics
Measuring is good. Metrics are essential for knowing deeply your product and for making more accurate decisions. But you must be very careful. The excess of metrics can get in your way and overshadow the full knowledge of your product. …
More on NPS
My latest article on NPS sparkled some interesting conversations on this metric that I believe are worth sharing: NPS has or has not the % sign? From a strictly mathematical point of view, we should use the percentage sign because …
Growth: the loyalty metric
The financial outcome must always be used as one of the metrics that indicate that the company is being successful and that it is reaching its goal. However, it must not be considered in isolation, because there is good revenue …
Growth: financial metrics
When I talked about the importance of being a data geek in the previous chapter, I explained the conversion funnel, which is formed by a set of data that we can consider short-termed, because within a few days (or even …
Product Manager’s #1 priority
In my recent articles, I’ve been discussing why “business demands => technology implements” doesn’t work, why business people hate discovery and I’ve introduced the concept of MVD (Minimum Viable Discovery). Today I’ll talk about every Product Manager’s #1 priority which, …
Growth: Engagement and churn
Once you get to bring in users (free or paid) to use your product, your next concern is related to the engagement from these users, that is, are they using the product? Are they solving the problem that the product …
Another example of an MVD – Minimum Viable Discovery
Lopes is the biggest real estate company in Brazil, where I’m leading the digital transformation efforts. A new hire who came from an e-commerce site mentioned that app push notifications generated more leads and had greater conversion rates than SMS and …
Why business people hate discovery
There are basically two reasons, one of them has to do with mindset and the other one has to do with the discovery process. The one that has to do with mindset is clear when we hear phrases like “Why …
Why “business demands => technology implements” doesn’t work
I’ve been working for quite some time in companies undergoing a digital transformation or which have people, including C-level, not familiar with digital product development methods. One of the biggest challenges in these companies is moving from a “business demands …
Growth: be a “data geek”
Take a close look at the data that your product generates! Aside from talking to your users and hearing their feedback, a mandatory way of knowing your product and how your users interact with it is through data. To take …
Growth: how to prioritize the roadmap?
This is a frequent question from every product manager. Whether is a new product that’s is being created now, or a fully operating product full of suggestions from clients and users, how to prioritize, that is, how to decide what …
Growth: what is roadmap and OKR?
The roadmap is a very useful tool for product managers. It enables us to plan and communicate the view of the future that you have for your product. Check out some roadmap examples: The first two examples are short-term roadmaps, …
Uncertainty and digital transformation
One aspect of digital transformations that seems to be common-sense among people who are in or who help companies go through this process is that what is most difficult is not the digital and technology changes, but the cultural and …
Cone of Uncertainty is another reason why we need to deliver early and often
I already wrote about 3 reasons why it is important to deliver your product early and often to your users. Now I want to give you a 4th reason, based on the Cone of Uncertainty concept from the project management …
What’s the difference between product and project?
I already wrote about the difference between product management and project management but I believe there’s room to go a bit deeper on the differences between product and project. So, a quick remembering of the definitions of product and project: …
Growth: listening to your users’ feedback
You discovered a problem of a group of people, and deeply understood this problem and its context. You discovered what motivates people to solve it, and analyzed the opportunity in detail in order to evaluate if it is worth building …
Innovation: next steps
Once you discovered a problem of a group of people, got to the bottom of it, its context, and the motivations that people have to solve this problem, you analyze the opportunity in detail. You evaluate if it is worth …
The 2 sides of Product Discovery
By the end of 2021, I had the opportunity to re-record the classes I gave at Cursos PM3 on the fundamentals of product management. It was a good opportunity to review and expand the content based on the new experience …
Innovation: How to get a return on the investment from building a digital product?
One of the most important questions of the opportunity assessment questionnaire we saw in the previous chapter is the question: “How are we going to measure success and make money from this product?”. It deals with two subjects: metrics and …
Why individual bonuses don’t work for product teams?
It is fairly common for the CTO or CPO to receive a request from the CEO to create some sort of individual bonus for the product development team. I have heard this kind of questioning quite often in some of the …
Innovation: a lot of opportunities
It is likely that, after focusing on the problem and understanding the job to be done, as described on the previous chapter, you will find not only one but a few opportunities to develop a new product or new features …
Innovation: the job to be done
Professor Clayton Christensen teaches at Harvard and wrote several books — among them The Innovator’s Dilemma: the revolutionary book that will change the way you do business[^InnovatorDilemma], a must-read for all those who work in technology –, and he developed …
Innovation: Focus on the problem
The first step to creating a new software product is to understand the problem. It is very tempting, as you begin to understand the problem, to go on and seek solutions. Human nature is to solve problems. Every software developer …
Leading and lagging indicators
During a mentoring session about a data concept that I think is very important, I noticed that I hadn’t written about that concept yet, so here it is. Anyone who knows me knows the importance I give to metrics. They …
What is innovation?
Of all stages of the lifecycle of a software product, innovation is the one that uses to present the greatest amount of questions. But what is innovation? How to find a problem to be solved? How to find out if …
Let’s remove the product from the center?
I have been working with digital products for over 30 years. I graduated in computer engineering at ITA in the early 1990s and since then I have worked for companies whose core business is technology. Starting with Dialdata, my internet …
Lifecycle of a digital product
I’ve talked a little about what is digital product management, the main characteristics of a product manager, and about some leadership and organizational culture tips for helping managers to lead without being “the boss”. Now, let’s talk about the lifecycle …
2 hacks to foster your digital product culture
I led product development at Gympass for almost 1.5 years. Prior to Gympass I always worked in companies where technology was the main product of the company, Conta Azul and Locaweb are two good examples. In this type of company, …
Organizational culture
Organizational culture is a very important theme for product managers and has a tremendous impact on the success of a digital product. Therefore, let’s dig into it. In a way, this subject complements the previous chapter on leadership tips for …
Leading product managers
Just as not every good developer can become a good developer manager, so do product managers. The same way as the skills a person has to manage software developers are different from the skills a developer needs to have to …
2 leadership tips for product managers
Product managers have the hard task of leading the product’s evolution without being anyone’s “boss”. In other words, they must convince everyone who works with their product that the path they defined for the product is the most adequate. In several …
7 essential characteristics of a product manager
What does a person need to have in order to be a good product manager? There are some important characteristics and I’ll talk about them here. But the most important of all is, certainly, the one that illustrates this article, empathy. …
Product manager or product owner?
Product manager or product owner? Which term should we use? Are they different roles? Are they complementary? Is there overlapping? Is it better to have two distinct individuals, one for each role? Or is it better to combine two roles …
What is digital product management?
We already have the definition of digital products, we saw many examples and many ways of categorizing these products. We also understood the difference between a product and a platform. Now we are going to define the role of digital …
What is a digital product?
Even before defining digital product management, let’s start from the beginning, that is, defining what is software and what is a digital product. Later, I’ll talk about what is digital product management and what are the main characteristics of being …
About the Product Management book
We are at that point in which there is software in places where a few years ago, we never imagined that there would be need and usefulness in having software: TVs, refrigerators, stoves, cars, watches, glasses, clothing, locks, tables, chairs, …
Conclusion
After this summary, we reach the end of the book. I have tried to document here what I have learned over the course of my career in the hope of helping others to learn more about leading digital product development. …
Summing up
In this chapter, I have transcribed the Summing up sections of all chapters in order to create a quick reference guide on all topics discussed in this book. Concepts I started the book by establishing some definitions, reviewing basic concepts …
Ceremonies
In this chapter, I’m going to talk about the ceremonies I usually use with the teams I lead. These ceremonies with different stakeholders aim at planning, aligning and managing expectations. I emphasize that this list is not definitive, that is, …
Feedback and performance evaluation
One of the main tools for the development of the people on your team is feedback. This word is an English term that originally means a process in which the actions of a given system are inserted back into the …
Hire the right people
As I mentioned in the chapter “People: priority # 1, always†we spend money and energy to attract, hire and retain the best people. Having people as the number one priority is the key to achieving any other goal. And …
Relationships
As I commented in the chapter Roles, responsibilities and seniority, expectations management is something that occupies between 50 to 80% of the time of a head of product. Your daily routine revolves around your relationships and interactions with many people …
Metrics
By now you should have realized how much I like metrics. In my first book, Startup Guide: how startups and established companies can create profitable digital products, I dedicated 6 entire chapters in addition to talking about metrics in the …
Measuring and managing quality
In 2015, we decided to extinguish the Quality Assurance (QA) function of our Locaweb product development team. We had 12 QAs, some with a developer profile and others with a SysAdmin profile. In proposing the extinction of the QA role, …
Measuring and managing productivity
How can we deliver faster? How can we deliver more with the same team? Why do we have the impression that the team is slow? When the team was smaller, it seemed that it could deliver more. These are very …
Vision, strategy, objectives, and team structure
This is the beginning of Part III of the book, about Tools, I’ll talk about the tools I’ve been using in my almost 30 years of product development leadership career and passing them to other leaders so they can use …
Ecosystem mindset
This value I learned at Gympass. It was one of the company’s corporate values ​​and, in my opinion, every platform must incorporate this value in its culture. I often came across CEOs and heads of platform products who claimed that …
Result delivery
Result delivery In the previous chapter, we saw the difference between a team that solves problems and a team that implements solutions. While a problem-solving team needs to have a deep understanding of each problem it will solve, the people …
New book: Digital products leadership
I used the year-end low workload to finish translating my book “Digital products leadership: The science and art of managing product teams” into English. Enjoy! \o/ Here’s a special launch discount coupon: https://leanpub.com/leadingproductdevelopment/c/launch And happy 2021, full of amazing results …
Focus on the problem
It is human nature to solve problems. Whenever we hear about problems, we go into solution mode almost immediately: we start looking for solutions to the problem. However, if we are able to get a better understanding of the context …
Release early and often
In the previous chapters we saw my personal leadership principles: People: priority # 1, always Leading is like being a doctor Leading under pressure Mentoring is a two-way street How and when to delegate We also saw what corporate culture …
Diversity, the basis of the best products
I have seen demonstrations of diversity with increasing frequency. I’m not much into watching TV, but one day in 2017 I ended up watching a little bit of TV Globo, the biggest Brazilian TV network. I watched the end of …
Transparency, the foundation of a high-performance team
In the chapter on “Leadership tips for a product manager” in my book Product management: How to increase your software’s chances of success I talk about two leadership tips that a product manager, or any leader, should use to help …
Culture and values
After talking about my leadership principles, I will talk about another fundamental theme for a head of product, organizational culture and values. There are 5 values ​​that I consider critical for the success of the product: Don’t waste time looking …
How and when to delegate
Delegating is the act of entrusting someone with a task and/or responsibility, usually with less seniority than the person who is delegating. Leadership is an ongoing act of delegating tasks and responsibilities. It seems like a straightforward activity, but it …
Mentoring
Mentoring is one of the most important responsibilities of a head of product: helping your team to evolve. As I said earlier, between 10% to 40% of the head of product’s time should be focused on helping people on your …
Leading under pressure
There is no work environment without pressure. I don’t know of any workplace where people say that goals are easy, that there is no risk in achieving the goals, or that the project will be delivered on time with 100% …
Leading is like being a doctor
In February 2011 I underwent cervical spine disc replacement surgery. The doctor performed the surgery on February 25th. However, the healing process took months. According to the doctor, it could take a year for all the symptoms that motivated the …
People: priority #1, always
Every company has its own culture and, within each company, every department also has its own culture. In addition, each person also has their principles and values ​​that guide their steps through life. In this part of the book, part …
Leadership anti-patterns
An anti-pattern is a common but ineffective and counterproductive response to a problem. This term was coined by Andrew Koenig in 1995, inspired by the 1994 book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software by Gamma Erich, Helm Richard, Johnson …
Developing the team and managing expectations
As I commented in the chapter Roles, responsibilities and seniority, in addition to defining and implementing the product vision and strategy, it is the responsibility of the head of product to develop his team and manage expectations. In the third …
Team structure
The product development team is the one who will execute the strategy and achieve the objectives to achieve the product vision. Therefore, an essential part of your strategy definition is to design and implement your team structure. In order to …
Strategy and objectives
What needs to be done to get your product closer to the product vision? This is your strategy and product objectives. We are then talking about defining what to do, how to do it, in what order to do it, …
Product vision
Despite being only 10% of a product leader’s time, defining the product vision is the most important responsibility. Without a clear product vision, it is very difficult to work on any other product topic. What are the priorities? What product …
Product management career
In my book Product Management: How to increase the chances of success of your software I comment on career progression starting with Business Analyst (BA) as the beginning of a career, with the responsibility of specifying what the product development …
Roles, responsibilities, and seniority
In the previous chapter we just reviewed some basic concepts of digital products. Now let’s understand what a head of product is, what its roles and responsibilities are. As I mentioned in the introduction to the book, the role of …
What are digital products and product management?
As I mentioned in my article about The role of the Product VP/Head, I’m writing an entire book about the many different aspects and skills needed to be head of product. The book will be divided into 3 mains sections, …
Where does product management sit in a company?
After reading the article “product marketing and product management“, about the differences between product management and product marketing management, it may seem that the best place to put product management in a company is in the marketing department. However, in …
What type of company needs a product manager?
When we think about the product management function, we always imagine it being exercised in a company whose core business is software offered via the internet, also known as Software as a Service, or SaaS. However, in my opinion, this …
Organizing for focus and diversification
When a company opts for diversification, team organization tends to be simpler. For each product, there will be a single team of engineers (2-8 people, which can be back-end or front-end or full-stack, depending on your product needs), plus a …
QA or no QA? That’s NOT the right question…
Back in 2016, I wrote an article about the reasons that motivated us at Locaweb to extinguish the QA function in our product development team. At Locaweb we had 12 QAs, some with a developer profile and others with a …
Focus or diversification?
Okay, I convinced you that those who do not diversify can get into a difficult situation, because a single product company ends up dying sooner or later. I also explained strategies for portfolio diversification and showed how to manage a …
Stakeholder relationships
A product manager’s life is all about relationships. Any product manager has to interact with many people inside and outside her organization that have an interest in the product she manages. In the corporate jargon, these people are called stakeholders: …
Diversifying – and digitalizing – a product portfolio, a case study
During the COVID-19 we did a diversification – and digitalization – of our product portfolio in record time. We went from one offline product, access to gyms and studios, to 4 products, 3 of them fully digital, in less than …
Guia da Startup agora é Gyaco / Guia da Startup now is Gyaco
Português Guia da Startup foi um blog que criei em 2012 quando eu estava escrevendo o meu primeiro livro. Eu trouxe todo o conteúdo para esse novo site, onde centralizarei todo o meu conteúdo. Se você quer ser notificado de …
The top-down trap
In my last article, I’ve discussed the differences between problem solver teams and solution implementer teams, why these teams yield better results, and how to build them. Top-down solutions When discussing these types of teams, I normally hear things like …
Problem solver vs solution implementer teams
Marty Cagan, a well-known reference in the digital product community, wrote some time ago an interesting article about Product vs Feature Teams where he explains the difference between three types of product teams, Delivery Teams, Feature Teams, and Product Teams. He wrote …
Customers do know what they want!
I’m currently reviewing the translation of my first book, called “Startup Guide: How startups and established companies can create profitable digital products” and I came across this interesting chapter which discusses the common belief that customers don’t know what they …
How to manage a product portfolio?
In my previous two articles, I explained why a company should worry about having more than one product and how a software product company can diversify its portfolio. In this article, I will talk about managing a product portfolio. When you have two …
How to diversify your product portfolio?
In my previous article, I talked about why companies should diversify their product portfolio. Now, I will show you how to do this. New Markets The first option is the search for new markets. When we think about it, we remember …
Are you thinking about your new product? No? So you are already late…
Did you know that Google has 177 active products in addition to 79 discontinued products? These are the statistics from Google just before it announced Alphabet in August 2015. And how many offices has Google spread around the world? I …
Defining roles with RASCI
In the series of articles, I talked about the relationship between the product manager and engineering, UX, product marketing, project management, and all other areas of the company. To close this series of articles about the relationship between product management and the other areas of the …
What about the other areas?
In previous articles, I talked about the relationship between the product manager and engineering, UX, product marketing and project management. The question that remains is: what about the other areas of the company? How is the product manager’s relationship with operations, service, legal, sales, administrative …
Product management in a crisis
I was writing a series of articles about the relationship between product management and the other areas of the company. I already wrote about: UX and product management Engineering and product management Product marketing and product management Project management and …
What is the difference between project management and product management?
In this series of articles where I write about the relationship between product management and the other areas of the company, I wrote about: UX and product management Engineering and product management Product marketing and product management Now I want …
Product marketing and product management
In this series of articles where I write about the relationship between product management and the other areas of the company, I wrote about: UX and product management Engineering and product management Now I want to write about the relationship …
UX and product management
I spoke previously about the relationship between Engineering and Product Management. The next area I want to comment on is the UX area which, along with product engineering and product management, forms the core product development team. What is UX? Here’s a …
2 hacks to foster your digital product culture
I’ve been leading product development at Gympass for 1,5 years now. Prior to Gympass I always worked in companies where technology was the main product of the company. In this type of company, digital product culture is part of the …
Projects vs problems
The new year is time for retrospective and planning. What is normally done every quarter by most product development teams is done more intensely during the turn of the year, together with other areas of the company, and for the …
What’s the best ratio between Eng, UX, and PM?
There are many articles we can find from different product development teams around the world showing benchmarks of Eng:PM and UX:PM ratios. There’s a recent article from Ken Norton, partner at Google Ventures and formerly head of product management at Google and Yahoo!, where he …
We can’t stand it, we need to rewrite everything…
This article was originally published in Portuguese in June 2017. I have heard this phrase several times throughout my career. Software developers know that invariably comes a moment when this kind of discussion comes up, which usually has phrases like: “it’s getting …
The relationship between product engineering and product management
How should the product manager relate to different areas of the company? Engineering, UX, product marketing, project management, operations, sales, legal, finance, customer service, human resources, and general management. Recalling what I said in the article Main characteristics of a product …
What is the difference between startup and product management?
Since 2011, there has been a lot of discussion about startups, with many books, lectures, discussion groups, events focused on the subject, which has a lot to do with digital product development and management. It has so much to do …
End-of-life
Your software product may have arrived here coming from three different paths: 1. Your product growth has slowed, and you have done all the analysis and testing described in the previous article to make sure that it has indeed reached the stage …
Product maturity
After the innovation phase, assuming that your digital product was able to pass through the abyss, it has grown. Only there will come a time when your product will enter the stage of maturity – remember the product lifecycle?. This is …
The role of the Product VP/Head
Being a head of product encompasses many different aspects and skills, and that’s the reason why I’m writing an entire book about this topic. However, since this is a question I get asked frequently, I’ll make a brief introduction to …
How to increase the chances of success of your digital product
The first edition in Portuguese of this book is from 2015. I wrote an updated version of this book in 2017. So only two years passed since it latest version. However, learning is a continuous endeavor. I continue to learn …
Problem vs solution mindset
When we hurry to launch an MVP, we are creating a solution for a problem. However, a very important step to create a good solution is the understanding of the problem. It is human nature to jump into solution mode when …
How does pricing work on a platform?
I wrote some time ago about the difference between a product and a platform. Platform business model is a very interesting topic, many businesses can benefit from understanding its dynamics and applying its principles into their own product or service. I …
Why the hurry to launch an MVP?
Originally published in Oct/2012. Why do we need to make an MVP, a Minimal Viable Product? Why do we need to hurry to launch a half-baked product? Why not wait to have the product with more features to launch it? Herb …
How to expand a marketplace?
To answer this question we need to understand the dynamics of a marketplace. Basically, there are 3 types of elements in a marketplace: Supply: goods or services available for consumption Demand: people or businesses that may need goods or services offered by …
Let’s talk about digital product revenue
One of the most important questions from the opportunity assessment questionnaire we saw in the article about “A lot of opportunities” is the question: “How are we going to measure success and make money from this product?”. It deals with …
The need for domain experts
Conta Azul is a platform that connects Brazilian small businesses to their accountants and everything they need to run their businesses. It connects small business owners to their bank in order to provide centralized finance control of their businesses. It …
How to make a career change to product management?
That is a question that I get a lot in my talks and my inbox so it seems to be a hot topic. Here’s my suggestion on how to make this career move. First step: Study Even though this is …
Putting it all together: vision, strategy, roadmap, and OKRs
In my articles about the growth phase of the product lifecycle, I described a set of 4 tools that will be of great support for your digital product management work when used together: vision: is the reason why the product exists. It’s what …
Designing your digital product strategy
Once you have defined the product vision you’ll be probably thinking something along the lines of: “Hum, I think my product is still far from this vision.†Then comes the question “how do I get my product closer to this vision?â€. This …
What is and how to build your product vision
At some point during the growth phase of your product, it may be helpful to create its vision and strategy. These tools will greatly help you in the decisions about what the future of your product will be. For this …
Some considerations about metrics
Measuring is good. Metrics are essential for knowing deeply your product and for making more accurate decisions. But you must be very careful. The excess of metrics can get in your way and overshadow your full knowledge of your product. …
Productizing exceptions
In my previous article about special requests I explained that the way you deal with special requests depends a lot on your product and your client base. If you have a B2B product focused on bigger customers, the product manager “must pay …
More on diversity
I’ve already written about diversity and why it is so important for product development. As a quick summary of that article, there are two main reasons that motivates building diverse product development teams: Diversity brings new points of view. Just as …
Seniority levels
That’s one topic we hear almost daily in every company: seniority levels. There are many situations when this topic arises. Hiring, performance evaluation, raises, promotions, bonus, etc. The more senior and employee, the more you expect from her. After all, …
The loyalty metric
The financial outcome must always be used as one of the metrics that indicate that the company is being successful, that it is reaching its goal. However, it must not be considered in isolation, because there is good revenue and bad revenue. …
Negative churn, the holy grail of subscription business models
When I talked about the importance of being a data geek in a previous article, I explained the conversion funnel, which is formed by a set of data that we can consider short-termed, because within a few days (or even hours) you …
Engagement and churn
Once you get to bring in users (free or paid) to use your product, as discussed in my previous article, your next concern is related to the engagement of these users, that is, are they using the product? Are they solving …
Be a “data geek”​
Take a close look at the data that your product generates! Aside from talking to your users and hearing their feedback, a mandatory way of knowing your product and how your users interact with it is through data. To take …
The problem of saying yes to everything
When we talk about prioritizing a roadmap, one thing that may happen is we end up saying yes to every request, from everyone. That is, everything is important because everything is added to the roadmap, and then the less important …
What to do with special requests?
When you are working on prioritizing a roadmap, you will certainly receive requests for new features coming from customers (or the commercial team) that, explicitly or not, come with a threat that if we don’t build this feature we will lose …
Defeating inactivity in practice
Last Thursday I went to Drogasil using Gympass t-shirt. After I got my medicine, the girl who helped me asked if I worked at Gympass. She explained that she downloaded the app because she was informed that she received this …
My new mission: to defeat inactivity
I’ve always enjoyed talking to people from different companies to get to know other contexts and the different problems they face. It is an opportunity to share what I’ve been learning over the years about software development management and to …
Mentoring
Few weeks ago Débora Alcântara asked entrepreneurs here at Linkedin what person would they choose as a mentor if they could pick anyone in the world. I was flattered to be cited among mentors such as Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Simon Sinek, Walt …
New book
Back in March I was invited by Dan, Marcell and Bruno to be part of a very interesting project they were initiating called PM3, an online product management course in Portuguese with 40+ hours taught by top tier Brazilian product management professionals. I accepted the …
12-month rolling roadmaps
I already explained what is a roadmap, how to build it and what they are used for (planning and communication). During my time at ContaAzul and now at Gympass my teams and I have been using a roadmap structure that has been …
Do you want to lead one of the world’s best product teams?
Two years ago I decided to move from São Paulo to Joinville to join ContaAzul. I described the decision making process in this article I wrote almost 2 years ago. Due to personal reasons I’ll have to go back to São Paulo …
Fail fast vs learn fast
I recently attended a 2 day MIT course on how to create high velocity organizations. The course was taught by Professor Steven J. Spear, author of “The High-Velocity Edge: How Market Leaders Leverage Operational Excellence to Beat the Competition.” This is …
Leading under pressure
I’m preparing a class on leadership and the role of a head / vp of product management and development for an online course on product management (to be launched on September 2018, in Portuguese). For this reason, I’m revisiting and updating some …
Digital or traditional
When I wrote about what is a software product, I mentioned different ways we can categorize software products. In order to categorize a software product we can look “to the way that the product is delivered to users (online, offline, web, …
Leading is similar to being a doctor
I’m preparing a class on leadership, so I’m reviewing some articles I wrote about this topic and I’ll republish them here. This article was originally published on April, 2011. Those who has been following my posts know that I like to borrow …
How does a product manager gain more autonomy?
Producto.io is a community of professionals who work with digital products. It is maintained by Arthur Castro , Raphael Farinazzo , Marcell Almeida , Éfrem Filho and Thiago Diniz, a group of seasoned product managers quite engaged in sharing interesting content through Medium. They’ve started a new series of articles called “What …
Feature lifecycle
In a previous article I explained the 4 stages of a software product: Innovation: from all 4 lifecycle stages of a software product, Innovation is the one that holds the biggest amount of doubts. It is also the stage that holds the biggest …
Apply product management in your internal systems
In November 2015, ThoughtWorks, a software development consulting firm well known for being always one step ahead of the software industry, has suggested in its Technology Radar, a periodic report with its vision on techniques, languages, platforms and tools related to development …
Why context is so important in software development
In this article I want to propose a thought experiment. Let’s use empathy, the main characteristic of a software product manager, to put ourselves in the position of a software developer who has received the following story from his team’s product manager: When …
How to prioritize a roadmap?
This is a frequent question that all product managers have. Whether it’s a new product or a fully operating product, full of user suggestions, how to prioritize, that is, how to decide what to do first? There is a good …
Roadmap or OKR?
In my last article I mentioned that my next article would be about roadmap prioritization techniques. However, in the beginning of 2016 I wrote about how OKRs were substituting roadmaps at Locaweb. At that time, my understanding was that eventually roadmaps won’t be …
What is a product roadmap?
Roadmap is a very useful tool for product managers. It enables us to plan and communicate the view of the future that you have for your product. Check out some roadmap examples: The first two examples are short-term roadmaps, that …
Why diversity is so important for your digital product success
I have seen manifestations about diversity more and more often. I’m not much of watching TV, but sometime ago I ended up watching Globo TV, the main open TV network in Brazil. I was able to catch the final part …
How to react to the feedback you get from your users?
You discovered a problem of a group of people, and deeply understood this problem and its context. You discovered what motivates people to solve it, and analyzed the opportunity in details in order to evaluate if is worth to build …
Innovation: Next steps
This is the last article of a series on innovation. Here’s the list of my previous articles on the topic in case you missed or want to reread: Innovation: What is it? Innovation: Focus on the problem Innovation: The job …
Innovation: a lot of opportunities
It is likely that, after focusing on the problem and understanding the job to be done, as described in the previous articles, you will find not only one but a few opportunities to develop a new product or new features for your software …
Innovation: the job to be done
Professor Clayton Christensen teaches at Harvard and wrote several books – amongst them The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Management of Innovation and Change), a must-read for all those who work in technology – and he …
Innovation: Focus on the problem
In my last article, I discussed about innovation, the first phase of the lifecycle of a software product. The first step to create a new software product is to understand the problem. It is very tempting, as you begin to understand the …
Innovation: what is it?
Of all stages of the lifecycle of a software product, innovation is the one that uses to hold the greatest amount of questions. But what is innovation? How to find a problem to be solved? How to find out if …
How does the lifecycle of a software product work?
Before we see how does the lifecycle of a software work, we need to understand the technology adoption curve. This concept came up for the first time in a book from 1962, called Diffusion of Innovations, written by Everett M. Rogers, …
Lifecycle of a software product
I’ve talked a little about what is software product management and manager, the main characteristics, and even about leadership tips and organizational culture for helping product managers to lead without being “the boss”. Now, let’s talk about the lifecycle of …
BA, PO, and PM
In July 2014 I wrote about the differences between product manager or product owner, where I say that product management and product owner manager are two sides of the same coin. While the role of product management is focused on the result, the software …
Air, food, and profit
I’m writing a series of articles on company culture and how it can affect the quality of your product and service. Checkout my previous articles on company culture: Don’t waste time looking for culprits War The fallacy of the internal customer Here’s …
War
As promised I’m starting a series of articles on company culture and how it can affect the quality of your product and service. Checkout my first article “Don’t waste time looking for culprits“. Here’s the second article. It is common to hear …
Don’t waste time looking for culprits
As promised I’m starting a series of articles on company culture and how it can affect the quality of your product and service. Here’s the first article. When mistakes take place, some people naturally tend to react by looking for culprits, especially …
Organizational culture
Organizational culture is a very important theme for product managers, therefore, let’s dig into it. In a way, this subject complements the article on leadership tips for product managers. Organizational culture is a feature of every group of people. Even within …
Quadrupling software development productivity without increasing team size and without quality loss
I wrote some time ago an article about how to organize product development teams and about some changes we made ​​in the software development teams at Locaweb. Since last year we have been focusing in productivity, i.e., how our software development teams at Locaweb could produce more …
More lessons learned on OKR
Some time ago I explained how we replaced roadmaps for OKRs at Locaweb. In that article I also talked about some lessons learned. Recently we made a retrospective of the last quarter and guess what happened? We learned some new interesting things, which I will share here! …
Product manager or product owner?
Product manager or product owner? Which term must we use? Are they different roles? Are they complementary? Is there overlapping? Is it better to have two distinct individuals, one for each role? Or is it better to combine two roles …
What is the difference between managing a product and a platform?
I’ve already explained about the differences between a product and platform in a previous article. I also explained what is software product management. Now I want to talk about the differences between managing a product and a platform. When we talk about software …
The fallacy of the internal customer
I have seen quite often people using the concept of internal customer or internal user when discussing work done between areas. Something along the lines of “I have here a demand for you and, as I am your internal customer I need …
What is software product management?
We already have the definition of software product, we saw many examples and many ways of categorizing these products. Now we are going to define the role of software product management: Software product management is the function responsible for all aspects of …
Product or platform?
More and more we see software products that can be categorized as platforms. There are many examples from big tech companies such as: Google, which with two products (Search and AdWords) created a platform connecting people who search information on …
OKRs, the future of product roadmaps (or how and why we replaced product roadmaps with OKRs)
Locaweb is Brazil’s leader in web hosting and SaaS applications like email marketing and online store. Locaweb hosts approximately 23% of all Brazilian domains. I work there since 2005 and I’m responsible for managing product strategy, roadmaps, product life cycle and …
What is a software product?
Before defining software product I think it would be good for us to define what is software. According to Wikipedia: Software is any set of instructions that directs a computer processor (hardware) to perform specific operations. Source: Wikipedia In this Wikipedia …
Why Paulo Caroli is translating my Product Management book into English
Here’s Paulo‘s answer in his own words: “I had the pleasure and honor to celebrate the release of my latest book together with Joca Torres, who was releasing the version of this book in Portuguese . On the release party, I got myself a copy …
Why I wrote a book on Software Product Management
You may be asking “Who is this guy to talk about software product management?” I find your question quite relevant and appropriate; so here’s a little history. I believe that my experience with software product management comes from the time …
About my Product Management book
We are at that point in which there is software in places where a few years ago, I never imagined that there would be need and usefulness in having a software: TVs, refrigerators, stoves, cars, watches, glasses, clothing, locks, tables, …
The book is on the table
“The book is on the table” is a phrase that every Brazilian who learns English is faced with when learning about use of preposition in English language. Hence the title of this article. 🙂 However, the book is not on …
What if we stop treating software development as a project?
When we treat software development as a project, we are giving it a start and an end, since all projects have clearly defined starts and ends. If we think about starts, that’s ok. All software development efforts have a clearly …
ThoughtWorks finally moves “product over project” from trial to adopt!
ThoughtWorks is a well known software development company which is always one step ahead of the rest of the software industry. Many people who contributed and continue to contribute to our industry are – or were – ThoughtWorkers. Martin Fowler, …
Don’t waste your time on who’s to blame
Whenever errors occur, some people have a natural tendency as their first reaction to look for someone to blame. Specially in group activities. As if having someone to blame would somehow make the error less harmful. This is a big …
The IT problem
I have talked to some people lately about IT departments and how they seem disconnected from the companies they belong to, often being very reactive to business demands. It is common to hear complaints from the business people about IT …
More thoughts on participative management
By the end of October I went to Business of Software conference, an interesting conference about, well, the business of software. Many interesting speakers and interesting people in the audience to chat. One of the presentations was given by Scott …
HR, participative management, democracy in the workplace and leadership
Readers of this blog already know Clóvis Bojikian, former Semco’s HR director. Back in 2009, when I met Clóvis, I wrote a long post about Clóvis experience in participative management. One month ago I received a Linkedin invitation to connect …
Why the hurry to launch an MVP?
Oct 7, 2012 Product Design & Discovery, Product Management, Project Management, Software Development 4 Min read
I mentioned earlier that I was starting: a new project called “The startup guide: how to create and manage profitable web products”. It’s a blog that will eventually become a book where I’ll explain how to create and manage a …
Why before how
This weekend I was at QCon São Paulo, a great conference made by developers for developers. In this conference I talked about “Guia da Startup” (Startup Guide), a blog (in Portuguese) that became a book (also in Portuguese) about product …
You need to talk with real users in order to build good software
I was reviewing ThoughtWorks latest version of their Technology Radar, which is a great source of information to help you know what’s hot in terms of software development and IT management, and notice it doesn’t mention Product Management (or you …
How to create a good checklist
I already mentioned about “The Checklist Manifesto” book in two previous posts, one explaining how important it is to use checklists, and another one on using checklists to deal with the unexpected. In this post I’ll reproduce some of my …
Startup guide: how to create and manage profitable web products
I’m starting a new project called “The startup guide: how to create and manage profitable web products”. It’s a blog that will eventually become a book where I’ll explain how to create and manage a web product with a profit. …
Lean startup experiment phase 4: revenue found, now need to find profit…
My lean startup experiment is an experiment I’m running to see if it is possible to launch a successful product (product = customer facing software system) without spending too much money and in a short period of time. In phase …
Restriction driven simplicity
I just returned from vacation and was reviewing some photos in my cel phone when I found some old photos from a previous trip to SF. In the airport there was an exhibition about TV sets and some old remote …
Using checklists to deal with the unexpected
I mentioned earlier about “The Checklist Manifesto” book. The post was originally written in Portuguese but you can find a Google translation here. In this post I mentioned about the use of checklist in surgeries and other medical procedures and …
Agile Product Discovery in a Non-Startup Environment – Building MVPs
As mentioned in my first post about Agile Product Discovery, I’m trying to take the ideas I used in my lean startup experiment (phase 1, phase 2 and phase 3) in a non-startup environment. Locaweb has almost 700 employees now. …
Lean startup experiment, phase 3: product launch
My lean startup experiment is an experiment I’m running to see if it is possible to launch a successful product (product = customer facing software system) without spending too much money and in a short period of time. In phase …
#BoS2011 day 3 notes
Today was day 3 of Business of Software 2011, aka, #BoS2011. Checkout my notes on day 1 and day 2 if you haven’t done that yet. Again good speakers and interesting topics, but again nothing really new for those who …
#BoS2011 day 2 notes
Today was day 2 of Business of Software 2011, aka, #BoS2011. Checkout my notes on day 1 if you haven’t done that yet. Again good speakers and interesting topics, but again nothing really new for those who follow product management, …
#BoS2011 day 1 notes
Today was day 1 of Business of Software 2011, aka, #BoS2011. This is my first time in this conference suggested to me by Dov Bigio (@dovb). Good speakers and interesting topics, although nothing really new for those who follow product …
What type of entrepreneur are you?
Some time ago Rafael Rosa (@rafaelrosafu) presented me the concept of lifestyle startup in opposition to the growth startup everybody knows. Growth startups vs lifestyle startups Growth startups – or companies- are startups that have one main objective, accelerated growth …
Agile Product Discovery in a Non-Startup Environment
I mentioned here about my lean startup Experiment (phase 1 and phase 2). I’ll post an update on this topic soon. Here I want to share another experiment I’m running. I’m trying to take the ideas I used in my …
Pick your battles
There’s a Seth Godin’s post that I always use as a reference: Gravity is a constraint. If you’re a designing an airplane, it would be a lot easier without gravity as a concern, but hey, it’s not going away. A …
Management 3.0
I mentioned earlier that one of the sources I’ve been reading and enjoying is Jurgen Appelo’s posts about agile management. I’ve been reading his posts for a while, since the time he was the CTO of a dutch company. I …
Lean startup experiment, phase 2: building the MVP
My lean startup experiment is an experiment I’m running to see if it is possible to launch a successful product (product = customer facing software system) without spending too much money and in a short period of time. Actually the …
Agile Product Discovery
I recently posted and twitted about my lean startup experiments. The word startup in lean startup may be misleading because startup gives the idea of a new company creation. However, the concept on lean startup fits very well within established …
The difference between a product and a project
Here’s a brief definition of a project: A project is an endeavor with a clear definition of what needs to be delivered and the date when it needs to be delivered. At first sight it may seem that a product …
Lean startup experiment, phase 1: the idea funnel
Four weeks ago I started an experiment. I had 5 ideas of possible startups so I put together a simple page for each idea explaining how the service was supposed to work, how much it would cost and if the …
The new rules of marketing and PR
I’m reading a very interesting book entitled “The new rules of marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing and Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly“: I’m still reading it but its central idea is so …
Try AND instead of OR
I recently read the post “And” Leadership written by Jim Highsmith that caught my attention on using AND instead of OR: One of the traits I think is very important [for an agile leader or manager] is that of “And†…
To freemium or not to freemium?
Some of today big companies offer their services for free (Google, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Slideshare, Youtube, etc.). They generate revenue through ads, having a paid version with more features or offering paid add-ons to users of the free product. This …
Behind every “what”, “how” and “when” there’s a “why”
Some people are only concerned with “whats”, “hows” and “whens”. However, behind every “what”, every “how” and every “when” there’s a “why”. Knowing the “whys” is one of the three pillars of motivation – autonomy, mastery and purpose. “Why” is …
What is Product Management?
DDD (Domain Driven Design) has a very powerful concept, so powerful that it is the first concept presented to anyone who is initiated in DDD, Ubiquitous Language: A language structured around the domain model and used by all team members …
Why there are so few women in programming and why this matters
Sometime ago I was talking to some friends from ThoughtWorks when one of them asked me why there are so few women in the IT industry? Specifically, why there are so few women in programming? Since I’m an open water …
Collaboration lessons from the marshmallow challenge
Ingredients: Groups of 4 people 20 sticks of spaghetti one yard of tape one yard of string a marshmallow Time constrain: 18 minutes Objective: tallest freestanding structure Lessons: Who consistently performs worst? Recent business school graduates Who consistently performs well? …
Do you work to earn money?
Do you work to earn money? Or do you work to solve someone’s problem and earning money is just a consequence of the good work you did solving someone’s problem? Earning money is one of many indicators that you’re doing …
The agile company
What does it mean to be agile? Being agile means being able to respond adequately to changes. Why is it important to respond adequately to changes? Because the environment we live in changes all time and it has been changing …
Revenue is like food
Recently I read a very interesting post written by Martin Fowler on the three pillars that serve as direction to ThoughtWorks. The three pillars came from Ben & Jerry’s mission statement: In his post, Martin used the phrase “revenue is …
Leading is similar to being a doctor
Those who has been following my posts know that I like to borrow ideas from medicine and relate them to software development an management. Below are two posts that make comparisons between medicine and software development and management: Software development, …
On purpose and happiness
I just finished reading Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose, an interesting book on Tony experience as entrepreneur and his findings along the way. The first thing he noticed is how important it is to …
Delegation levels
Just found a very good article on delegation by Jurgen Appelo. Here’s a very concise summary. The main idea is that delegation is not a binary decision where you either delegate or don’t delegate. There are other levels of delegation …
Story map is a great tool for agile product management
Jeff Patton, who defines himself as agile old-timer, UX practitioner, good product evangelist and family guy, presented in his blog the concept of story maps, a replacement for backlogs that helps people see the forest and not only the trees. …
4 types of company culture
I just found an interesting presentation by Lloyd Taylor. He was Director of Global Operations for Google for 3 years and after that he was VP Technical of Operations at Linkedin for another 3 years. His presentation was done during …
Responsibility, accountability and authority
In last 2 weeks I had a chance to review and reinforce my understanding of responsibility, accountability and authority. One can only be responsible and accountable for something she has the required authority to deal with. For instance, a product …
That’s the way it is
The longer someone uses a product the more likely she become “blinded” to the small failures all products have. This happens not only with regular users of a product but also with the product manager who manages the product and …
Extreme Presentation
Giving presentations is one of the items of almost any Product Managers job descriptions. I just got another interesting link from Jason Yip, the Extreme Presentation method. He has an interesting definition of two styles of presentations and when to …
Agile management
When we implemented agile methodologies at Locaweb, the same way that some developers asked to leave because they were not willing to adapt to some of the agile principles that we decided to embrace, some of the existing managers also …
Top 10 Mistakes in Behavior Change
Just found an interesting short presentation – 12 slides – about the mistakes to avoid when we try to change a behavior. By “behavior change” think in terms of your own behavior regarding something or the behavior of your team …
The management roles and responsibilities
I just read two very good articles on roles and responsibilities of a management team. A CEO does only three things: Sets the overall vision and strategy of the company and communicates it to all stakeholders. Recruits, hires, and retains …
It's all about the people
I just read a very good article entitled Our Priorities Reveal our Values from Simon Sinek. I already mentioned Simon in my article Purpose beyond profit. Here’s a part of the article that got my attention: I listened to a …
Under pressure
Jason Yip just reminded me about the “under pressure” situation: When people are pressured to meet targets they have three ways to respond: Improve the system Distort the system Distort the data Fonte: Jason Yip’s blog Yip is reading what …
Netflix Business Opportunity
I’ve already mentioned here about Netflix Culture. Today I came across another very interesting Netflix presentation where they explain their business opportunity for potential employee candidates. At least, this is the subtitle of the presentation “Some Background for Candidates”. What …
Hector's list of happiness
Jason Yip just brought to my attention Hetcor’s list of happiness, from the book Hector and the Search for Happiness. Just bought it and will start to read it today! 🙂 Making comparisons can spoil your happiness Happiness often comes …
Software development, craftsmanship and how to choose a professional
Last week I read two very interesting posts in Dan North’s blog: Programming is not a craft On craftsmanship The first one explains why software development is not a craft, but that pissed off lots of people, hence the 151 …
The good is the enemy of the good enough
Everybody knows the phrase “the perfect is the enemy of the good” attributed to Voltaire. But sometimes even “good” is way too much for what is needed, i.e., “the good is the enemy of the good enough”. The search for …
How can we improve?
Today I just read two posts about how to improve from blogs of very diverse topics such as swimming and leadership. The blog post about swimming is from coach Terry Laughlin: Psychologists who study the acquisition of excellence say that …
Let's use the "reduce, reuse, recycle" motto when writing software
When my 4 years old daughter likes a song, she asks me to repeat the song over and over. I believe this is no news for any parent… 😛 This weekend’s song was “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” by Jack Johnson. Below …
Purpose beyond profit
If you have a small kid who goes to kindergarten you most certainly have used the word purpose during your conversation about her day at school. “She didn’t do it on purpose.” is an answer we get when we ask …
How do we know what the customer wants?
In my last post I mentioned the lessons we can learn from the end of Google Wave and I also mentioned how important it is to know the customer, to understand if our product idea solves a customer’s problem and …
Prototype: first impression
The word prototype is formed by two greek words, protos (first) + typos (impression). We know how important it is to use prototypes as a first impression of our products and systems, as suggested by the origin of the word. …
Google Wave sunset provides some interesting product management lessons
Last week Google’s announcement about the end of Google Wave made me review and rethink about some product manangement lessons. Product discovery Marty Cagan, former eBay Product Management VP and currently product management consultant, uses to say that all product …
It doesn't matter who had the idea
Sometimes I find myself in an argument trying to show that my idea may be beneficial to the group or organization but the person I’m talking to is stuck with his point of view. In such scenarios it is hard …
The three ways of getting things done (hierarchy, heterarchy and responsible autonomy)
I just finished reading a very interesting book named “The Three Ways of Getting Things Done“: by Gerard Fairtlough. It is about hierarchy, heterarchy and responsible autonomy in organizations. Gerard main thesis is that the human being is addicted to …
How should we draft an information architecture?
Actually, it’s quite simple, as Donna Spencer points out: Just make it up. Wait? Is it that simple? But in order to make it up you just ned one thing: information. You need to understand what you are trying to …
Which one is the right product to invest?
Which one is the right product to invest? Ice Cream Glove: Snuggie: Answer: there’s no way to know if you base your answer on opinions. The only way to be sure which one is the right investment is: getting “out …
Clóvis Bojikian, former Semco's HR director, on how to implement organizational democracy
I believe this will be one of my longest posts but the topic really deserves a lot of attention. Two weeks ago I had the opportunity to talk to Mr. Clóvis Bojikian. He was Semco‘s HR director since early 1980’s. …
Organizational Democracy
Check out this video from Traci Fenton, WorldBlu CEO, on organizational democracy: A brief summary of the above video: The motivation According to the Gallup Organization, 73% of the American workforce is disengaged at work. In Japan is 91% of …
Managing without managers
Maybe you already heard about Ricardo Semler: CEO and majority owner of Semco SA, a Brazilian company best known for its radical form of industrial democracy and corporate re-engineering. Under his ownership, revenue has grown from $4 million US in …
4 thoughts on leadership
In Portuguese / Em Português I’ve written some posts on leadership on this blog. Recently we discussed largely about this topic here at Locaweb so I decided to write yet another post about leadership. It is about 4 thoughts on …
How is your business health?
Recently I read the following tweet by @mkapor (Mitch Kapor – bio: founder, angel, director: Lotus, EFF, Mozilla, Second Life, Foxmarks. Into IT, innovation, politics, and a level playing field): GM failure no more surprising to me than a cardiac …
Open-book management
In Portuguese / Em Português Similar to the open source concept used in software development and distribution, there’s a management concept known as open-book management. The idea is quite simple: the financial reports (the company book) must be open to …
Agile methodologies are processes, agile is culture
Posted originally in Portuguese at Locaweb’s AgilBlog I recently read about agile culture and how some teams use only the processes embedded into the agile methodologies without absorbing the agile culture: Agile development is more culture than process Creating The …
Recurring dream
Just read this XKCD post. I’m so glad that I’m not the only one with this kind of dream… 🙂
Nice animation
“In 1969 a 14-year-old Beatles fanatic, armed with a tape recorder, entered a John Lennon hotel room and convinced him to give an interview. It was Lennon’s bed-in time, when he and Yoko stayed in hotel beds in an effort …
"Getting Real" is an excellent PM handbook
37signals is “a privately-held Chicago-based company committed to building the best web-based software products possible with the least number of features necessary. “ They wrote a book called “Getting Real” where they share tons of pragmatic advices on how to …
POGE (Principle of Good Enough)
POGE (Principle of Good Enough) is quite agile and very aligned with the MMF concept. Wikipedia definition: The principle of good enough (sometimes abbreviated to POGE) is a rule for software and systems design. It favours quick-and-simple (but potentially extensible) …
Top 10 Agile Team Management Practices
Mike Griffiths from Leading Answers just wrote an interesting post where he explains the top 10 team practices for managing an agile team: Empower them Listen to them Trust them to get the job done and solve problems Judge when …
What's the ideal sprint length? Part II
I already talked about this issue previously, but I recently read a post about the same topic at InfoQ that brings more insights to the question: Forces that tend to Shorten No Changes: The rule of no scope changes during …
Being a PM is an exercise of leadership
In a recent post at schmula, the author mentions: Gary Convis was recently brought in to be the CEO of Dana Corporation (DAN), an $8.7 Billion manufacturer of auto parts. Convis is a 40 year veteran of the auto industry …
Minimal Marketable Feature
Minimal Marketable Feature or MMF comes from a book named Software by Numbers by Mark Denne and Dr. Jane Cleland-Huang, In this book they introduce the concept of: Incremental Funding Methodology (IFM), an ROI-informed approach to software development in which …
Bezos on Innovation
In a recent interview published in Business Week site, Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com’s founder talks about innovation at Amazon. It is worth reading it all but I would like copy here one question: Q: Every company claims to be customer-focused. Why …
What changes for a manager in a team moving into agile?
In a traditional environment, a technical team manager is responsible for prioritization, task distribution and progress control, among other non-technical responsibilities such as people management, new employees training and team representation to the rest of the organization. As soon as …
Featuritis x experience
As people normally say, a picture is worth a thousand words. In Kathy Sierra’s Featuritis Curve there are some words, but the message from the whole picture is more than the sum of the words: Shmula brought the topic back …
What's the ideal sprint length?
That’s a tough question. You will be able to find sprint length recommendations ranging from 1 week to 2 months. The ideal length depends on: Overall Length of the Release: Short projects benefit from short iterations. Amount of Uncertainty: The …
From 500 to 50,000 to 5,000,000 (users, accounts,…)
When developing a new product sometimes the team working on it get the question, or even formulate the question about what should we do if we grow to 50,000 users or to 5,000,000 users? That’s an important question and should …
Agile Principles
Directly from Agile Manifesto website, these are the principles that support Agile Software Development: Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness …
Explaining Agile
If you need to explain very briefly what is Agile Software Development and its benefits, use the Agile Elevator Speech: … agile is basically three things: a set of engineering best practices that allow for rapid delivery of high-quality software, …
When a product is ready for launch? (2)
At the same time that we need to spend on non-recurring development cost in order to avoid the recurring operational cost, we need to be aware that sometimes, adding more development may not decrease recurring operational cost. Marty Cagan, from …
Product launched. Now what?
The launch of a product is a big step, but it is not the end of the product manager’s work related to that product. When you launch a product you need to manage a living product which is quite different …
When a product is ready for launch?
Release an internet product early but with a few known bugs? Or wait until the product is perfect? When is the right time in the development lifecycle to release the product? There are many approaches to these questions. Since we …
The rewrite syndrome
It’s not unusual to hear the phrase “stop, we need to rewrite this” at some point in a project. There are even entire projects dedicated to rewrite a system. Chris Stevenson and Andy Polls told their experience of An Agile …
Learning from competitors
Despite of LocaWeb’s Blog service, I decided to use Blogger so I could test someone else’s blog service. Knowing the competitors is essential for any product manager, and what a better way to know a competitor than using its product …
We'll never get our product right the first time!
And we’ll never get our product right the next time either. When we start the development of a product, we have an idea of its features based on our conversations with customers and based on our understanding of the product’s …
Agile and large teams
Team size is a concern in agile methodologies. Many articles about this topic recommend a team no greater than 9 people. Amazon uses an interesting concept for defining if the size of an agile team is not too big, the …
How do product managers prioritize requirements?
From Jeff Lash’s Ask A Good Product Manager: I’ve known people who have tried scorecards, ranking systems, voting (see Product Development is not a democracy), but ultimately these are just ways to avoid the responsibility that product managers have to …