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Recent Writings

• Hardest Question: Building a successful software product requires answering thousands of important questions throughout its lifecycle. Yet, there is one question that if you can master, will make every other answer even better.
• The Shape Of User Stories: User stories are ubiquitous in agile teams, but they wind up taking lots of different shapes depending on the maturity of the team and company. Here are common shapes that stories take and what to watch out for.
• Feature Gambling: Is adding that next feature the right move, or a foolish bet? Building software products has a lot in common with gambling in a casino, so play your cards right.
• Estimate Value Not Complexity: Story Points are in every agile shop, but often fall short of any expected use. So lets explore estimating stories by value instead.
• Project Manager To Owner: -

Featured Essays

• Estimate Value Not Complexity: Story Points are in every agile shop, but often fall short of any expected use. So lets explore estimating stories by value instead.
• Feature Gambling: Is adding that next feature the right move, or a foolish bet? Building software products has a lot in common with gambling in a casino, so play your cards right.
• Features Soup: -
• Getting Started Using The Rice Prioritization Framework: -
• Getting Started With Lean Canvas: The Lean Canvas has been around for years, but I find many people aren’t familiar with it. In this article I tell you how to get started and use it to gain interest and de-risk that next product idea.
• Hardest Question: Building a successful software product requires answering thousands of important questions throughout its lifecycle. Yet, there is one question that if you can master, will make every other answer even better.
• Prioritizing For Feedback: Prioritization is complicated, but one simple way to do it is to deprioritize everything that isn’t essential, and then seek feedback on those unessential items to pull a few back in.
• Quick And Dead Of Prioritization: There are so many ways of prioritizing product work ranging from subjective to quantitative. Almost none justify themselves with results. In this post I will share how I prioritize product work with clients by using four simple categories of core, quality of life, retention, and other.
• Scoping Technique Impact Mapping: There are so many great scoping techniques for products and projects but Impact Mapping is one of my favorites. It is fast, easy, and asks the right questions.
• The Shape Of User Stories: User stories are ubiquitous in agile teams, but they wind up taking lots of different shapes depending on the maturity of the team and company. Here are common shapes that stories take and what to watch out for.
• Why I Killed Two Products: There are lots of reasons to kill a product. It may not have enough ROI or it may find itself in sketchy territory legally. I want to share some examples of these and when I’ve killed products.