Saying No as a Product Owner or Product Manager

TL, DR: Saying No Without Burning Bridges

Are you navigating the delicate art of saying No as a Product Owner or product manager? Actually, it’s more of a strategic ‘yes’ to higher priorities, turning down lower-level requests without shutting down communication.

This article will dive into various approaches, from reframing conversations and fostering stakeholder collaboration to being transparent to data-informed rationale and empathetic engagement. Discover how to maintain a harmonious balance between driving Product Goals and nurturing professional relationships with your stakeholders.

Saying No as a Product Owner or Product Manager — Age-of-Product.com
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Product Discovery for Scrum Teams — Scrum Tools, Part 2

TL; DR: Product Discovery for Scrum Teams

While Scrum excels at building and releasing Increments, it does not guarantee that those are valuable—garbage in, garbage out. Scrum teams can equally make things no one is interested in using at all. The critical artifact to create value is the Product Backlog, “an emergent, ordered list of what is needed to improve the product.” (Source.) However, Scrum does not elaborate on how the Product Owner identifies Product Backlog-worthy work items. That would be the job of the process that feeds into the Product Backlog: product discovery.

Learn more about which frameworks have proven useful to augment Scrum with product discovery practices.

Product Discovery for Scrum Teams — Scrum Tools, Part 2 — Age-of-Product.com
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Janna Bastow: Lean Roadmapping and OKRs — Hands-on Agile #42

TL; DR: HoA #42: Lean Roadmapping and OKRs w/ Janna Bastow

In this energizing 42nd Hands-on Agile session on Lean Roadmapping, Janna Bastow, the go-to-authority on product roadmaps, talked about being lean while creating and maintaining your roadmap and how objectives and key results (OKR) may help meet that challenge.

Janna Bastow: Lean Roadmapping and OKRs — Hands-on Agile #42 — Age-of-Product.com

📺 Watch the video now: Janna Bastow: Lean Roadmapping and OKRs — Hands-on-Agile #42.

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App Prototyping with Absolute Beginners – Creating a Shared Understanding of How Empiricism Works

TL;DR: App Prototyping with Absolute Beginners

Yes, even absolute beginners can prototype an app. And learn a lot about agile product management, Scrum, empiricism, product design, and user experience along the way.

If you intend to live up to Scrum and agile product development’s full potential, creating a shared understanding of how empiricism works among all co-workers in your organization is essential. This low-cost exercise of creating clickable prototypes will significantly improve your organization’s agile transformation.

App Prototyping with Absolute Beginners – Creating a Shared Understanding of How Empiricism Works — Age-of-Product.com
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Product Roadmap First Principles

It’s Product Roadmap Building Time Again!

The end of 2020 is nearing, and it’s product roadmap building time again—at least for those companies that are still dedicated to the old command-and-control model. In the next few weeks, executives and (key) stakeholders will come together and define new functionality that they believe will meet business demands in 2021.

While investing in product roadmaps can yield a reasonable return by creating a shared understanding between the “the business” and product teams, I also believe that product roadmaps need to be living artifacts requiring continuous attention by everyone involved. To make that process as worthwhile as possible, adhering to the following seven product roadmap first principles has proven beneficial in my experience.

Product Roadmap First Principles — Age-of-Product.com
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11 Proven Stakeholder Communication Tactics during an Agile Transition

TL; DR: 11 Proven Stakeholder Communication Tactics

Stakeholder communication: It is simply not enough for an agile product development organization to create great code and ship the resulting product like a clockwork. It would help if you also talked about it, particularly at the beginning of your endeavor to becoming a learning organization. Marketing your journey to the rest of the organization—and thus securing their support, collaboration, and buy-in—is a critical success factor to step up the transformation game: You want to become agile, not “do agile.”

Learn more about eleven proven stakeholder communications tactics that contribute to making this happen.

11 Proven Stakeholder Communication Tactics during an Agile Transition — Age-of-Product.com
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