What does an empowered tech company actually look like, and who does what? — If you haven’t seen what “good looks like” before where you’ve worked, and you are curious about how others do it in modern functional tech companies, then let me describe to you how it goes down in an empowered product tech company. This is where real innovation and great products…

In their new tech company — Over the course of the last few years, I’ve been doing a lot of learning and teaching about why other Tech Founders, especially CEO/Founders, should definitely NOT be dictating the Product Strategies of their new tech companies. …

Well, you can, but your business probably won’t scale. — Startup -> Scaleup Scaling your tech product business requires at least two things that need to scale when moving your business from startup to scaleup. Scaling your organisation — i.e. hiring more people. Scaling your tech — i.e. increasing your compute and data resources. One of these things scales proportionally to the number…

Manufacturers do Product Development as well, but its NOT done on a Production Line! — Back in the mid 2000’s I started training software teams in Agile Software Development processes all over the USA and Europe. At the time a new movement called “Lean Software Development” started to surface, spearheaded by some very respectable ex-engineers the Poppendiecks, and I was captured by their work. It…

Other than the fact that they both involve writing code! — Welcome to part 2 of this short series. If you want the highlights of this article, please jump over to the end of the first part of this series. In this part, we jump straight into the weeds on “why” this stuff matters. The Basics Let’s say that most software professionals (there…

How to tell, and why it matters — Something that is not well understood by most working in the software world is the difference between building a product and building a solution. I want to help you understand this difficult distinction because the difference in how you go about: organizing for, funding, managing, designing and making these two…

Which one gets the final say in Product Development? — In my day job, we build tech products for our clients. Our clients are generally non-technical founders, and they are with us for the long haul. …

The concept of a Product Trio has been around for a few years now. Both Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) and Teresa Torres (Product Talk) have written about the role a Product Trio plays in the design & development of tech products. We see real benefits in its approach…

The YAGNI principle (you ain’t gonna need it), as a design principle, in practice, is a very powerful utility for all software engineers to adopt and master. However, it can cause issues when working in software teams. It is clear that if you are effectively applying YAGNI in practice, you…