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Articles by Flow Bohl
Comparing The Top Five Prioritization Methods
Many product managers, including me, don’t always know if their work will lead to the desired outcome. In these moments it’s helpful to gauge the sentiment of internal stakeholders and customers to prioritize a messy backlog. The following are five popular prioritization methods and my view of their usefulness in varying situations.
Product Failure is An Opportunity
“Fail faster” is something nobody really wants. Failing slowly is of course worse than pulling the plug early on a badly performing product. However, the ultimate goal is to succeed faster. Obviously. Failure is just the inevitable ingredient to create successful businesses and products. What people mean when they say fail faster is in fact “learn faster”. Learning comes with trial and error.
Iterative prototyping and feedback for better UX design
Lean startup is a methodology that can help your company articulate hypotheses better, identify the fastest ways to test those hypotheses, figure out what minimum viable product (MVP) to build, test that MVP with customers, learn and iterate, and ultimately to achieve better and better product market fit. While many product teams are excited about lean startup ideas, they often run into challenges when trying to adopt lean principles because they lack specific guidance on what to actually do.
5 tips on A/B testing mobile apps
Here I share some learnings on how to experiment on Mobile Apps. Photo by 7shifts on Unsplash I’m a Product Manager and lately, I’ve been studying a lot about A/B tests and had my first experiences with it in mobile apps. Experimentation is something that I always had the will to try on, but never had the opportunity before. I learned a lot in this process and I would like to share some of these learnings with you so you can make fewer mistakes than I did. Probably your first experiments will fail.
Implementing AI in the product — Not at any cost!
Here are a few rules that will help you understand when AI is not necessarily the best option for you and your product: Rules are enough Whether you are trying to predict what is going to happen next, classify an object or detect an anomaly, if you can solve this with IFTTT rules (If This Then That) do it. It might be that the problem is not that complicated, or the model that you built doesn’t seem to perform better than rules.
Why Safety Culture Is a Heart of the Software Engineering Model?
Safety culture is a culture where employees can tell the boss bad news. — Dr Sidney Dekker A joy of safety — Image by UnDraw Organizations are moving from the blame culture to blameless culture. Now, the leaders are participating in “what caused the problem?” rather than “who caused the problem?”. Industry leaders are trying to build a culture of a collaboration of teams and break silos. Why culture is so essential for an organization? How it is going to impact the employees?
My Two Cents: A Robinhood Failure Analysis (a sequel)
How a $7.6 billion behemoth unicorn managed to fail its 10MM+ users. Back in August of 2018, I published a piece on Robinhood’s glorious and calculated growth story. As of late 2019, they announced their ten-millionth customer account opened. However, in my opinion, this chapter of growth is over. In this article, I discuss their hurdles and mistakes and illustrate why Robinhood’s next chapter will likely be slow and painful.
How Do You Define Team Focus Without Micromanaging?
Another question I’ve gotten a lot is: Who in the organization defines the balance between innovation and optimization? How do you define the balance without micromanaging your teams? In the case of Showmax, I was the Chief Product Officer, so it was possible to build it into the organization, working with the CTO. It was structured such that there was an overarching set of KPIs agreed upon at the leadership level.
How Color Can Affect The Usability Of An App And Website
https://images.pexels.com/photos/326503/pexels-photo-326503.jpeg Color is a tool that designers often use in their designs. There is a possibility that they mainly use black and white that, in theory, are not considered colors, but it is likely that in a large part of their projects they will have to consider two or more colors. Color has a great impact on users because it can convey feelings and, together with typography, help generate a certain environment in design.
What Are the Services of the Scrum Master to the Product Owner?
Make team Understand Project Goals and scope The Scrum Master holds a responsibility to make the team understand the project objective. Also, he has to explain the project goals and scope. Scrum Master discusses the project values with the Product Owner and tells to the team why the project is important to deliver in the given amount of time. Understanding the project requirement, the team will start preparing themself in terms of tools and techniques to deliver the project on time.
The Four Cornerstones of Mindful Leadership
Mindfulness, your biggest ally as a Leader — Photo by Lesly Juarez on Unsplash Mindfulness: Paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, without judgement. That’s how Jon Kabbat-Zinn, the creator of MBSR (Mindfulness-based stress reduction) defined mindfulness. While this definition is incredibly precise, it is also an invitation to practice and come to our senses, again and again.
4. If you want to calculate your ROI, do it like an adult
Children don’t usually understand the concept of how much things cost. My son used to think that if daddy’s monthly income was higher than the price of an iPhone, it had to be bought right away. This childish perception of finances is often the case with managers in any business. It’s very typical of them to draw parallels between business and everyday expenses. One business owner I knew (a very successful one) used to say: “Are you out of your mind spending so much money on a poster layout design?
The Art of Positive Confrontation
“Looks like this isn’t working. This sort of thing happens. I need to try something else.“ -That’s the feeling a positive facilitator has to fix one problem. Image by Undraw Last week, I have started a project with my scrum team. I am the facilitator of the same team, the most generic term is “SCRUM Master”. This was the project where the team has adopted a new tool to develop their APIs. The whole team got training from vendors.
Opportunity Canvas 2.0
My trimmed-down version of the Opportunity Canvas I’m a huge fan of Jeff Patton’s work and for years I’ve used his Opportunity Canvas — I highly rate it! But over time I’ve often run into very similar friction points with it. The canvas is quite big and it can be a big ask to make people fill it out when coming up with new opportunities across the organization. Many who aren’t well versed in product often struggle completing the canvas and it can often require a Product Manager to help facilitate.
Agile Development and Willie Nelson
A FUN BREAKDOWN How agile software development and country singer Willie Nelson share the same principles As an agile practitioner and after my PSM1 certification I became too aware of the agile principles and the concept of Kaizen, so much so that it started to dip into my personal life and one of the things I enjoy the most — music. I started to see agile principles everywhere even in songs.
Place Your Product Bets
When was the last time you had an idea you were 100% certain would be a success? Was it actually successful? If you build products for a living you likely know that scenario above rarely happens. The reality of product management is that most of the ideas we generate fail. There are a host of reasons why failure is the most common outcome that I won’t get into now, but the crux of the matter is that developing something new involves a high degree of uncertainty.
The “Not-To-Do” List For Building Great Product
The anti-habits of successful product people I first learned about the concept of a “Not-To-Do” list from Tim Ferriss, who said what you don’t do determines what you can do Understanding how certain habits can negatively impact our ability as entrepreneurs to deliver value to our customers and users on a daily basis allows us to limit ourselves only to behaviors which allow us to thrive and succeed. Product people wear a thousand hats.
8 Different Ways to Organize Your Backlog to Make it More Impactful
Linear backlogs are so yesteryear Photo by Chris Lawton on Unsplash Often we don’t question our product backlogs, they’re a list of stuff we hope, might and would like to do, but do they always have to be represented as a list? Jeff Patton was one of the first people to challenge the notion of a linear backlog when he created — and then wrote the book — User Story Mapping (more on that later).
Good and bad metrics for product improvements
No product manager, experience designer or software engineer would have a job if all they did is deliver products on time and on budget. Because, of course, anyone’s job is only as valuable as the value they create and any company only survives if it generates enough profit (unless you work for an NGO, the government or Uber). The problem, however, is that value is not only hard to define for each role, department or product, but it’s equally hard to measure.
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