The main objective of any product manager is to ensure the process of product management runs smoothly and flawlessly: from the concept to release. However, it's all about the ideal world.
In order to present a brilliant product to the world, it is important to learn how to use convenient and multifunctional online tools that facilitate management and open up new opportunities for managers, expanding their professional horizons. In this article, you will find 15 smart tools that contribute to the professional success of product managers in 2019.
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.
The increasingly competitive job market demonstrates that performing only based on hard skills alone is no longer sufficient. In project management reality, hard skills contain creating work breakdown structures, managing a project budget, earned value assessments and critical path charts. All these skills require technical background and applying professional knowledge and tools to perform well. What are the soft skills of leadership and how they help to uncover project managers' facilities?
Books with the word «Agile» in their titles began to appear on the shelves of IT experts and other industries' professionals after 2001. The term was used during the declaration of the Agile Software Development Manifesto. Agile describes a software development methodology that is characterized by short life cycles leading to frequent product releases.
Today this iterative or incremental method affects various aspects of development and business including project management. What are the best sources to learn Agile? This post covers 10 powerful books that may enhance the skills of project managers and their teams.
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.
The Agile methodology consists of various mandatory concepts and artifacts. A product backlog is one of them. This is actually a set of requirements received from the business and formulated in the form of development tasks.
Backlog grooming is not a magic wand; it's a comprehensive activity aimed to ensure that all the tasks are always in clear order. How can the grooming process be improved? And what are the special things about it?
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.
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.
Large companies and big teams always consist of various strategic departments and roles. Therefore, it's not a rare case when people face confusion in understanding some job positions.
Is it always clear to understand what the key responsibilities of different managers within one team are? For example, the roles of a product manager and a project manager have much in common. Supposedly, one of these PM’s have heard at least once in life the cheesy question «Is there any difference at all?" However, do not hurry to blame and shame the people who confuse their functionality. Product Manager and Project Manager are completely different roles. The goal of this post is to define clear differences between two strategic positions in software development companies to keep you out of all doubt.
A product manager is a key person who typically presents ready product solutions to the wide external world. To be considered a successful and professional product manager, you should have enough experience, enthusiasm and, of course, professional management skills, strong communication, and other essential abilities. Professional qualities help product management experts to competently manage, present, and bring the product to the market.
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.
Whether you are a project management guru or just a beginner, you’ve definitely heard about Gantt charts. At first sight, these diagrams might seem chilling and complicated, however, they are not as mystifying as you may think.
Gantt Charts assist project managers and their teams to improve their productivity and efficiency of workflows and ensure timely tasks execution. The charts can be applied to small projects and the most complex ones. What are the secrets of the diagrams developed by Henry Gantt and what people in project management used before they were created?
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.
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.
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.
It is not always easy to find out the right path in development processes (as in other business activities). Various obstructions may disturb. The future life of any product or service depends on choosing an appropriate development methodology. As Kanban is often named as one of the current trends in project management, here we gathered the most essential benefits of Kanban software development and applying convenient Kanban boards and cards. Just to be trendy ;)
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.
Scrum allows Agile teams working on complex projects and delivering winning products by solving problems adaptively. This popular straightforward method is widely used to handle projects and get things done. Scrum projects more accurately fulfill customers' needs because they encourage continuous feedback.
There is no need for detailed analytics to understand that Scrum continues to grow in popularity just because of its many benefits and general effectiveness. And the important merit in this belongs to a Scrum Master. In this post, we extol and praise the role of a Scrum Master, without which no Scrum project succeeds.
Scrum includes a series of special meetings, commonly referred to ceremonies, which assist to facilitate all the methodology’s processes.
Scrum strongly enforces the goals and time boxes for everything, including the ceremonies. This post covers these outstanding events and identifies the goals for each as well as their necessity. Take 7-8 minutes to figure them out.
When it comes to choosing between two options, there is always a risk to be influenced by opinions and dubious facts. Selecting any methodology or work approach, we strive to avoid mistakes and study as many facts and details about the subject as possible to make the right choice.
In Agile software development, this choice is also challenging, especially if it's about Scrum and Kanban.
