Product discovery — Find all Articles on Age-of-Product.com.com

Webinar #1: Product Discovery Anti-Patterns [Video]

by Stefan Wolpers | 2018-05-07 Agile TransitionWebinars

TL;DR: Webinar Product Discovery Anti-Patterns — April 10th, 2018

Scrum has proven to be a practical product delivery framework for digital products like applications or apps. However, Scrum is equally suited to build the wrong product efficiently as its Achilles heel has always been the product discovery part. What product discovery part, you may think now. And this is precisely the point: The product owner miraculously identifies the best way to proceed as a team by gating and prioritizing the product backlog is. How that is supposed to happen is nowhere described in the Scrum Guide. Consequently, when everyone is for himself, product discovery anti-patterns emerge. I believe it is time to address this issue with the webinar product discovery anti-patterns.

From sunk costs, HIPPO-ism, my-budget-my-features to self-fulfilling prophecies — learn more about the numerous product discovery anti-patterns that can manifest themselves when you try to fill Scrum’s product discovery void.

Hands-on Agile Webinar Product Discovery Anti-patterns

Create Personas with the Help of the Engineers

by Stefan Wolpers | 2017-11-16 Agile TransitionLean and Product

TL; DR: Create Personas with the Help of the Engineers

Creating valuable software requires knowing the customer—we all agree on that, right? The first question that then comes to mind is how to support this product discovery process in a meaningful manner in an agile environment? And the second question follows swiftly: who shall participate in the process—designers and business analysts or the engineers, too?

Read on and learn why personas are useful for product discovery purposes, how to create personas, and why the complete team—including the engineers—needs to participate in their creation.

Create Personas with the Help of the Engineers — Age of Product

Ebookmakr Failure: The Fallacy of Knowing What to Build – The Post Mortem

by Stefan Wolpers | 2015-10-29 Lean and Product

Executive Summary – Lessons Learned from Ebookmakr’s Failure:

Love the problem more than your solution.
Don’t push too far your dreams of China in your hand.
Use prototyping tools such as Marvel when running user interviews. (More here: Four Lessons Learned From Making Customer Value Your Priority.)
Be careful with the selection process for user interviews: You might end up picking those that will support your vision – it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy trap.
Beware of false positives in user interviews.
Never start writing a single line of code before an appropriate number of customers signed up. (For clarification: Customers are paying users.)
Never spend money on developing a prototype when you’re not working full-time on growing the user-base and increasing customer value.
Be patient and give your product the time it needs.
Always make branded t-shirts and wear them later regularly to preserve the recollection of the disaster. (See below.)

Four Lessons Learned From Making Customer Value Your Priority

by Stefan Wolpers | 2015-10-22 Lean and ProductPodcasts

TL;DR: Four Lessons Learned From Making Customer Value Your Priority

Building a valuable, usable and feasible product does not happen overnight. These are my four core learnings from focusing on customer value, looking back at the projects I have been pursuing over the years.