Product Management *

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.

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.

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.

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.

5 tips to help you achieve your desired goal. Of course, it is not necessary to carry them all out and in the order indicated. However, it is important not only to read them and forget, but try to apply them in your life.

This is the final part of the series describing how we’re increasing our service availability in Citymobil (you can read the previous part here). Now I’m going to talk about one more type of outages and the conclusions we made about them, how we modified the development process, what automation we introduced.

This is the next article of the series describing how we’re increasing our service availability in Citymobil (you can read the previous parts here: part 1, part 2, part 3). In further parts, I’ll talk about the accidents and outages in detail.

1. Bad release: database overload

Let me begin with a specific example of this type of outage. We deployed an optimization: added USE INDEX in an SQL query; during testing as well as in production, it sped up short queries, but the long ones — slowed down. The long queries slowdown was only noticed in production. As a result, a lot of long parallel queries caused the database to be down for an hour. We thoroughly studied the way USE INDEX worked; we described it in the Do’s and Dont’s file and warned the engineers against the incorrect usage. We also analyzed the query and realized that it retrieves mostly historical data and, therefore, can be run on a separate replica for historical requests. Even if this replica goes down due to an overload, the business will keep running.

A roadmap is an important work tool for a product manager. In this article, we will define the stages of creating a roadmap and learn about services for creating the ideal roadmap.

This is the next article of the series describing how we’re increasing our service availability in Citymobil (you can read the previous parts here and here). In further parts, I’ll talk about the accidents and outages in detail. But first let me highlight something I should’ve talked about in the first article but didn’t. I found out about it from my readers’ feedback. This article gives me a chance to fix this annoying shortcoming.

This is a second article out of a series «Citymobil — a manual for improving availability amid business growth for startups». You can read the first part here. Let’s continue to talk about the way we managed to improve the availability of Citymobil services. In the first article, we learned how to count the lost trips. Ok, we are counting them. What now? Now that we are equipped with an understandable tool to measure the lost trips, we can move to the most interesting part — how do we decrease losses? Without slowing down our current growth! Since it seemed to us that the lion’s share of technical problems causing the trips loss had something to do with the backend, we decided to turn our attention to the backend development process first. Jumping ahead of myself, I’m going to say that we were right — the backend became the main site of the battle for the lost trips.

The modern projects on the optimization and the automation of many business processes, assume, as a rule, that the first step will be the analysis of the large amount of the client’s documents. The purpose of it is the modelling the business processes “as-is” in a very tight schedule. The list of the analyzed documents includes normative legal acts, industry standards, SCRUM user stories, regulations, technical specifications and other corporate documents.

The analyst for the project faces a rather time-consuming task which is at the same time a routine one as well. It doesn’t have many means of automation at present. According to the analysis of modern means of business process modelling, even such well-known applications on the market as Enterprise Architect, ARIS, Bizagi Modeler do not have any support mechanisms for business process model building in their text description.

This article is focused on the BPMN model extraction from the document.

In this first part of an article series «Citymobil — a manual for improving availability amid business growth for startups» I’m going to break down the way we managed to dramatically scale up the availability of Citymobil services. The article opens with the story about our business, our task, the reason for this task to increase the availability emerged and limitations. Citymobil is a rapid-growing taxi aggregator. In 2018, it increased by more than 15 times in terms of number of successfully completed trips. Some months showed 50% increase compared with the previous month.

The business grew like a weed in every direction (it still does): there was an increase in server load, team size and number of deployments. At the same time the new threats to service availability emerged. The company faced a task of the most importance — how to increase availability without compromising company growth. In this article, I’ll talk about the way we managed to solve this task in a relatively short time.

Accumulating technical debt may lead your company to a crisis. But it may also become a powerful driver of massive process changes and help with engineering practices adoptions. I'll tell you about it on my own example.

What do you get when you cross an IT department, a faulty Sprint review, determination, and pizza? Greatness, that's what.