This Blog Series is for my friends who are on the Business side. This group of posts is primarily focused on those providing requirements to Engineers, such as Business Analysts, Product Managers and Product Owners. There will be future Blog Series for other business-types, including executives, Project Managers and Program Managers.
Relationship Goals: Aiming at the Same Target
I suspect that if you’ve spent any time as a Product Manager, a Business Analyst, a Product Owner, a Project Manager or a Program Manager, you have experienced frustration dealing with your Engineering team. We don’t mean to be frustrating – as a rule, we are trying to the [...]
How to “Renew” Your Relationship with Engineering
In my last post in this series, I made the bold (and perhaps surprising) claim that the Business part of the software company and the Engineering part of the software company actually share the exact same objective. The problem turns out to be that the Engineering group isn’t aware [...]
Speaking of Customer Value…
In the first two posts in this series, we established that the role of Engineering is to efficiently deliver valuable functionality to Customers and the first task of the business people is to help convince them of that. Whether you have been successful in that quest or not, you [...]
Building Value
In the previous post, I suggested that you express every requirement (or Story if you are using Scrum) in terms of the business value it delivers. In this post, I look at the flip side. Once the Engineering team works on your requirement or Story, it can quickly devolve [...]
Making Technical Decisions
The last few posts have talked about expressing requirements in business terms and also insisting on getting information back from Engineers in terms of the business impacts. What you will start to realize is that, as you help arbitrate between technical options based on their business impact, that almost [...]
Boundaries – What You Can Specify and What You Can’t
I get this question from Product Managers / Product Owners all the time (and a little less often, but still often from Engineers who feel infringed upon). The question is: What can a Product Owner specify and what can’t they specify? This is actually related to the previous post and my [...]