An Agile Coach approached me and asked me for reference documents or people to share with him. He wanted to gather some examples on agile roadmaps but it was difficult for him to find good examples of agile roadmaps. Most of the examples that he found were far from agile. Here's my answer.

My second ever yearly reflection. I'm reflecting on my life as a solopreneur, product management trainer, and myself as a human. And revealing my word for the year 2024.

I was very skeptical about Product Ops. I couldn't grasp it. What's Product Ops anyway? What do Prod Ops Managers do the whole day? Why do we need yet another new role and even a whole new team that does things that we've been doing without them the whole time? Aren't we sick of creating new titles for old concepts? UNTIL.... I talked to Chris. Chris Compston. Check him out! Hi Chris. Thank you Chris. Chris is my best friend now. Sorry old best friends, you've been pushed aside (you are not but you know I need the dramaturgy).

Eine weitere spontane Aufnahme eines Gespräches, dieses Mal mit Julia Wissel, Director of Product at MOIA. Wir haben über Bäume generded und sind uns einig, dass ALLES im Grunde ein Baum ist. Und als wir dann bei unserer Begeisterung für KPI-Trees waren, musste ich auf Aufnahme klicken (natürlich mit ihrer Erlaubnis).

A few weeks have passed and I am still being asked what I think of the announcement Brian Chesky made at Config 2023. I waited some time to get more details about the change, and let's be honest at Config 2023 he only speaks about one part of the change but not about details. His announcement regarding the Product Management function and role also was not very clear. He used their internal wording and didn't think about the how the listeners would understand it. What is a "function"? I'd say it's the department in a big company, or team as in org function in a small company. But not the role and the discipline itself. He mentioned it in a tweet as well that he "should have been more clear":

While we are all aware by now that a good product strategy needs to create focus, we stopped talking about focus when we get into execution mode. When have set our focus in our product strategy but go all over the place when executing on the product strategy, we will not build successful products. We need to ensure that we keep focus when we execute on the product strategy. Therefore, whenever we make prioritization decisions, we need to start from strategy and work our way down to the backlog level through a cascade of decisions. I ran an in-house talk where I talked about "Strategic Prioritization". After sharing a screenshot of my slides...

Niko Noll und ich tauschen uns immer mal wieder aus zu Themen wie Produktmanagement, Solopreneurship, unsere eigenen Produkte, unsere eigenen hands-on Erfahrungen, Coaching, Interim, ..... und überhaupt 🙂 Dieses Mal haben wir spontan auf den Aufnahme-Knopf gedrückt, als wir gemerkt haben, dass das Thema, über das wir gerade sprechen, auch für andere Product Manager und Product Owner sein könnte.

There are wonderful collections of prioritization techniques out there that you can read to learn about the most popular techniques and how they work. My favorite two collections are one from Folding Burritos and one from Productboard. This collection is meant to give you some tips that are based on my real-world application of these techniques, some background info that you might not know, and show you some more techniques that you might not know about yet (at least in the context of prioritization). Let's start with two techniques that you have for sure heard a lot about already, and then raise the bar little by little.

Data analysis learning: Know your universal set. In our case your user segments. Background: Recently I mentioned on LinkedIn that I had unsubscribed from Netflix because they keep killing series after season 1 or 2 with a cliffhanger, and I don't want more cliffhangers sitting in my head. Here's the original post. Netflix is known for making decisions based on numbers. I don't want to argue on their numbers, obviously I don't know their numbers. But some arguments under my post made me decide I want to make aware on the bias that sneaks in when we forget to closely look at our universal set.

This is another mini series that I had posted on LinkedIn.

In one of my LinkedIn mini-series I laid down how you can find meaningful outcomes with the 5-Whys, how the outcomes cascade …

“Outcome-thinking is difficult.” Agreed. I noticed how often we fall into the trap of thinking that we talk about outcomes when we actually talk about outputs. So I have to steer the conversation back to real outcomes, especially in outcome-based ideation or discovery sessions. 👉 But what is an “outcome” anyway? And how do you realize if you’re thinking in outcomes or outputs? Here's a mini series on detecting output-thinking and finding outcomes. These are two of my LinkedIn posts with links to the original post, as asked for from my followers to find it when they need it.