Articles
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Using OKR Dashboards to Keep Focus on the Goal Employees often lack two key pieces of information that would help keep them motivated and focused: What goal am I pursuing in my current task? And how much progress is being made? You can generate constant transparency around answers to these questions by using dashboards that outline objectives and key results, or “OKRs.” Keep everyone informed about current goals and the path to achieving them. |
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5 Key Elements for Designing a Successful Dashboard When you’re designing a dashboard to track and display metrics, it is important to consider the needs and expectations of the users of the dashboard and the information that is available. There are several aspects to consider when creating a new dashboard in order to make it a useful tool. For a mnemonic device to help you easily remember the qualities that make a good dashboard, just remember the acronym “VITAL.” |
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Using Metrics to Track the Efficiency of Agile Teams Choosing agile metrics that will be most effective in measuring application success is a challenge, and then tracking those metrics can be tricky as well. But with a good strategy, agile metrics can be a powerful tool for sharing the team’s progress and identifying existing and possible roadblocks. These meaningful metrics can reduce confusion and bring clarity throughout the application development cycle. |
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Instead of MVPs, Maybe We Should Be Releasing SMURFS The term minimum viable product, or MVP, has come to be misunderstood and misused in many organizations. It doesn’t mean you should be releasing half-baked, barely feasible software. Instead, you should be thinking of your product’s capabilities as a Specifically Marketable, Useful, Releasable Feature Set—or SMURFS! |
Better Software Magazine Articles
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Making the Move to Product-Driven Process Just because you follow the rules of your software development process doesn't necessarily guarantee project success. According to David Hussman, there are four product-centered principles that everyone should practice. |
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Planning to Performance Test Your App? Think Again! To complement functional validation, software teams are expected to validate performance. But, according to Jun Zhuang, you must be prepared to invest time, personnel, and resources to benefit from performance testing. |
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Is Agile Breaking Product Management? It can be a challenge for a product manager to know how to lead an agile software team. As product managers take on many different roles throughout a project lifecycle, there can be confusion, resulting in the product manager doing what nobody else wants to do. Steve Johnson offers a perspective of the agile product manager that every software developer should know. |
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Monetization 2.0: The Evolution of Software Licensing The cloud and the rapid migration to mobile devices and the Internet of Things have made traditional software licensing schemes obsolete. Omkar describes new software monetization based on business, pricing models, and usage. |
Interviews
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Product Owner Certification: An Interview with Sanjiv Augustine on Agile, Lean, and Scrum
Podcast
In this interview, Agile Leadership Network cofounder Sanjiv Augustine discusses his upcoming product owner certification class at the Mobile Dev + Test Conference. He talks about who should go, detailing how he'll be incorporating agile, lean, and Scrum into the lecture. |
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The Essential Product Owner—Championing Successful Products: An Interview with Ellen Gottesdiener
Video
In this interview, Ellen Gottesdiener talks about her presentation at Agile Development Conference and Better Software Conference West 2014, the importance of having context for requirements, good ways to set value considerations for requirements, and the common mistakes of product owners. |
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Improving the Efficiency of Your Metrics: An Interview with Mike Trites
Podcast
In this interview, Mike Trites, a senior test consultant, talks about his upcoming presentation at STAREAST 2014, the future of metrics, the importance of improving the efficiency of your metrics, and even an interesting take on the old phrase that numbers never lie. |
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On Agile Methods and the Rise of Lean Startup: An Interview with Arlen Bankston Arlen Bankston is a lean six sigma master black belt and certified ScrumMaster trainer. In the following interview with StickyMinds editor Jonathan Vanian, Arlen discusses the rise of the Lean Startup movement, tools to capture customer feedback, and what constitutes good metrics. |
Conference Presentations
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Making the Marriage of Product and Engineering Thrive
Slideshow
y now you have probably heard that there should be a healthy tension between the product and engineering teams. The key word there is "healthy"—when this relationship is unhealthy, silos tend to form, ideas may be thrown over the wall, and a lack of ownership can develop. |
Vidya Dinamani
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Beating the Feature Factory Mindset
Slideshow
On a human level, we crave outcomes and impact. But in software product development, there is something addictive about the "build more and more features" approach that often leaves people frustrated and unsatisfied. Developers understand the challenges of working in output-focused environments and the adverse effects this has on productivity, morale, and business impact. Join John Cutler as he discusses these "feature factories," why they exist, how they impact your business, and how you can shift the focus to outcomes and impact. John thoroughly makes the case that churning out features is no longer a competitive advantage and can in fact harm your business and disengage your team. Instead, he will show you how to move your organization beyond the feature factory and toward an outcome-based way of working that increases employee engagement and customer satisfaction. |
John Cutler
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Impact Maps: Let Your Goals Drive Your Product Features
Slideshow
Wouldn’t it be great if there were a way to combine quantified business goals, direct traceability from goals to features, surfacing of value assumptions, cause-and-effect analysis, design thinking, and visual facilitation in a single approach? Mathias Eifert says there is! Impact maps... |
Mathias Eifert
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Project Management Tips to Improve Test Planning
Slideshow
When done right, testing is more than test plans, test scripts, and executing tests. In fact a test leader should consider testing a sub-project of the larger development project. By applying the same techniques project managers use to plan and manage the overall project, test leaders can... |
Ricki Henry, Clark County Nevada
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