Management

Young product managers aim to rapidly learn the fundamentals of their role and master the craft. However, there are no magic power, specific book or a class that can give you 100% of professional mastery.

You want it all, you want it now. But it will surely take some time to make you a product management guru. This post contains a set of relevant resources about product management for those who prefer to read, listen and watch.

Successful decisions are being achieved by the efforts of individuals. Their collaboration is the key to success. No matter if they have won a basketball champ or released a new software product.

Where does the team path to success begin? In this post, we share ten essential tips on how to improve team meeting discussions and describe five powerful methods that accelerate brainstorming sessions. IT professionals, this will perfectly suit you too.

When it comes to optimizing overwhelmed daily workloads, to-do lists may not cope. In this case, it's worth to look for something that will keep track of all tasks your team is working on and tasks that are yet to be started, as well as to show the full picture of all the tasks that are completed.

A powerful Kanban board is the solution. This excellent project collaboration tool is widely used in software development, digital marketing, construction, innovative solutions and among other cases where there is a steady workflow of tasks. The Kanban approach helps teams to visualize workflow, analyze processes and achieve greater task management efficiencies. In this post, we describe 14 Kanban tools with advanced features. Compare them and choose the best one right for your needs!

A strong and confident strategy in product management solves many challenges. Any product manager should strive to develop professional skills and abilities to build a strategy like great far-sighted commanders. The ability to plan well, determine priorities and evaluate them are the essential components for creating your effective strategy.

This brief guide will be useful if you are looking for ways to improve strategic planning skills and want to learn how to prioritize competently.

In today’s contemporary world the private computer has become a staple of daily life.
Even those few persons who don't use computers in their daily work life can possibly have access to a computer on that they perform alternative necessary tasks.

With all of the access to info that computers permit and with all of the work they will facilitate a personal perform, this trend of a computer in every home and in each workplace of business isn't shocking.

But what may be shocking, and downright aggravating, is when the computer you are working on suddenly shuts off, goes blank, or explodes in the dreaded blue screen of death.

These and other common computer problems are among the most frequently occurring issues that one might experience with their computers.

The following may be a list of 5 common Computer issues and what may be done to mend them.

Teams that apply popular Agile practices explain why they have chosen this methodology in their own ways. For someone, it seems obvious to work with obligatory and “sacred” Agile; someone can define non-binding or controversial practices. In any case, Agile is one of the most popular methodologies in project management nowadays. Its practices and concepts are appreciated by many developers and managers around the globe.

What are these powerful practices that make Agile popular and trendy? Here we share the list that is definitely incomplete but foundational.

Daily internal meetings in the format of stand-up or just a short team's gathering are aimed to optimize work processes and synchronize work. The tradition to arrange such 15-20 minutes meetings has been firmly established in the activities of most modern businesses. Agile development teams also practice these everyday meetings. However, Kanban, Scrum, or XP meetings differ and include their own rules and principles.

Here you'll find some essential arguments to support the importance of daily Kanban meetings. We'd like to share our thoughts about the main concept of Kanban meetings, their value for the workflow and tips on how to hold them properly.

In late 2006 I became the first coordinator of the Free Software Foundation Europe’s legal department. It was called, for reasons lost to time, the “Freedom Task Force,” and it constituted myself, Carlo Piana as the General Counsel, and several volunteers with connections to organizations like gpl-violations.org. Our goal was strait forward. We wanted to enhance knowledge and communication across Europe with respect to open source software and to ensure that both commercial and non-commercial actors in the space would get the full benefit from its potential.

One may ask why a legal department was being used for what sounds like a relatively general goal. Such a question can be answered with context from the time period. In 2006 one of the main discussions about sustainability for open source was related to legal matters, particularly concerns or challenges related to patents and copyright matters. Simplifying things somewhat, there were open questions regarding whether patent challenges could make open source expensive or unsustainable for commercial actors, and there were open questions regarding whether parties could or should follow the terms of open source licenses.

On the latter point, and somewhat amusingly when used from the perspective of today, some parties were of the opinion that the terms of open source licenses might not be mandatory. Harold Welte, the team at gpl-violations.org and lawyers like Dr. Till Jeager in Germany are owed a debt for laying this question conclusively to rest not only in their own nation but globally. While it may seem superficially counter-intuitive, their work to ensure clarity a substantial foundation to encourage and sustain commercial investment in the sphere. After all, when it comes to investment, a clear, unambiguous and level playing-field is vital.

The working arsenal of any project manager consists of own stable methodological reserves and secrets of management. Everyone strives for effective business outcomes based on their own intuition, practical experience, professional tools, and well-known techniques. These outcomes can be achieved if there is no chaos in the project life cycle, and the manager knows what to do at each stage, including determining the critical path of the project.

What is the value of determining the critical path and why is the critical path method (CPM) necessary? In this post, the example of how to determine the critical path. So, let's repair the old backyard swimming pool with the help of CPM.

There are many ways to work out the order and privilege in which your product features should be brought to life. In fact, someone often tempts to go just with their gut. Feature scoring is a low-cost and convenient way to define the relative value of any number of things you may work on.

Uber, as we know, operates only in 650 cities and remains the best among all taxi apps. But have you ever imagined about other cities and their demand for taxi applications? If you did, you would have certainly come across a few regional apps like Ola, Didi Chuxing, Japan Taxi, etc. These apps are focused on fulfilling the demands of locals; and in that way, they have succeeded and generated revenue tremendously. If you search for the reason behind the success of these apps, it inevitably ends up in the kind of service it provides its customers. So, it all depends on how well you bestow your service (whether you focus regionally or globally).

It is difficult to imagine a situation when a product manager does not face prioritization challenges. Can you quickly decide what to place to the first place?

Any product timeline requires a clear order and only qualitatively decomposed and managed tasks will lead you to a decent and successful product release. In this case, you will not successfully perform without a powerful prioritization. Where to start and how to define the most appropriate prioritization method? Especially if you are a newcomer in the product management world? Here we describe the ICE scoring prioritization method that empowers product managers to choose the right features for development.

The process of mergers and acquisitions is complicated and requires much more effort than most business owners might expect. Generally, most workload is put on project managers who shoulder the bulk of responsibility for keeping both the existing and new projects on track. They have to not only understand the purpose of the planned M&A, but also consider all the operations that can go wrong. Then, businesses are more likely to end up with success, and not a failure.

Recently I’ve been getting invited to a lot of interviews, and they all go pretty much the same way: I come on, we chat for a while, and then… they make me a job offer. Like I’ve already passed the technical interview stage and confirmed my skills. The thing is, I don’t even have a mega-popular GitHub page with examples of my code, and my CV is so bland it looked like I was forced to write it. The only outside indication that I’m worth something is my ability to answer technical questions, but I’m not even being asked to do that anymore.

The reason for that is simple: I wrote a couple of Habr articles and they became popular. Looks deserved and normal at first glance: since I shared my experience publicly and people have clearly appreciated it, my skills are considered “community-approved” and there’s no need for a lengthy interview.

But the articles aren’t even about my skills at all — mostly they’re there so I can whine about my depression. I mean, I’m glad I don’t have to prove anything to anyone anymore, but seriously: THAT passes for a quality developer these days? Are you out of your mind? I believe you are, and the symptoms are everywhere.

Dealing with priorities is a constant necessity in product management and development processes. In order to improve professional skills, product managers should find time to explore and try using simple and complex methods and frameworks to determine priorities.

The Lean Prioritization approach is one of the simplest and most accessible methods that help product managers with managing task backlog, especially when it needs to be done quickly and efficiently. This post is about the power of Lean Prioritization.

What is prioritization about? Product managers will agree that it’s rather critical to choose the right features for development, filter the most important of them and skip less urgent ones. This is all about the art of prioritization.

If you are not sure about your prioritization skills and want to get more, this quick guide will assist to discover how to find the evaluation criteria for your product and how to select appropriate strategic growth metrics. You will also find out how to offer more value to customers and establish all internal processes inside your team with the help of prioritization methods.

The role of project management is becoming more and more relevant no matter in which area or industry it is implemented. In fact, it balances all project processes and steps and helps project teams meet their goals and objectives.

Project management helps to reach goals faster, cheaper and avoid risks thereby contributing greatly to business strategy execution. More companies cannot imagine their performance success without project management as one of the key business competencies. Since this competence is actively developing, professional project management software is also evolving with it in the same way.

Every «hype» thing or event has a certain regularity: the more people talk about it, the less they really know about it. Scrum is not an exception. You may find hundreds of relevant articles and IT news, where it may seem that there is only one best Agile methodology and this is Scrum. A large Agile family contains various powerful methodologies and Scrum is not the sole system of implementing Agile principles. However, this methodology is still actively used all over the world.

People go mad about Scrum: many IT blogs write about it, many practical courses promise to teach all Scrum features, many companies want to see a working experience with Scrum in CVs, and so on. Scrum conquers them all. In this post, we define why.

Is it always easy for you to prioritize the tasks of the huge project? What if five or more tasks have the main priority and urgency?

Experienced project managers and product owners know that intuition is not enough in such cases. In order to avoid missing deadlines, today, managers are able to apply useful methodologies for determining priorities, as well as modern tools that help to visualize data and not miss anything in their workflows.

Given: A company which uses the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) to scale Agile development across the organization; 10 development teams combined into one big team (Agile Release Train, according to SAFe terminology) to deliver a common product; the need for a two-day quarterly planning (PI Planning) to determine the work plan of IT teams for the next 3 months *; three development offices with the distance between the most remote ones exceeding 6 thousand kilometers and corresponding working time difference of 5 hours; previous planning experience which implied usage of analogue boards / whiteboards / highlighters / sticky notes and respective physical presence of all key employees in the same room.

* This heavyweight construct “The work plan of IT teams for the next 3 months” threatens to increase the size of the text significantly, so hereinafter I’m going to replace it with “the commitment”. Accordingly, to draw up and adopt a work plan will be “to commit”.

Why do we need this?

1) Fatigue with analog methods of work. While spaceships are plowing the Space, and Elon Musk is boring his tunnels, we, the IT guys, have been persistently writing with highlighters on sticky notes sticking them on the boards — there is really some kind of dissonance in this, isn’t there? That’s what our commitment looked like a while ago: