When working on any agile project, most people will agree there is still a need to understand requirements. With the quick iterations of these projects, it’s more important than ever, to use visual models to capture the requirements. When done correctly, they are easier and quicker to create and understand than a list of written [...]

One of the challenges of Agile projects is ensuring that the requirements remain “Agile”. While software requirements are not necessarily neglected on Agile projects, an Agile project may erroneously take a waterfall approach to requirements. Here are some simple techniques to adapt your requirements management effort to an agile project. The quotes at the beginning [...]

ProductCamp Austin is coming in a couple of weeks – it’s a “collaborative un-conference/workshop on Product Management and Marketing topics.” It’s free to attend! Seilevel will be sponsoring the event and offering up a volunteer to photograph the event! We’ll put the pictures on Flickr for everyone to see after. My personal thought about it [...]

To begin with an analogy: I have a friend that can be unreliable sometimes and show up late when we have plans to meet. This is especially difficult to manage when we are meeting to see a movie – if she shows up 30 minutes late, then the movie date is off because the show [...]

To begin with an analogy: I have a friend that can be unreliable sometimes and show up late when we have plans to meet. This is especially difficult to manage when we are meeting to see a movie – if she shows up 30 minutes late, then the movie date is off because the show [...]

There is a correlation between projects that meet documented needs (but not the business needs) and the ‘Halo Effect’. The Halo Effect, as defined by the American Heritage Dictionary, is “an effect whereby the perception of positive qualities in one thing or part gives rise to the perception of similar qualities in related things or [...]

Unfortunately, many of us have been in situations where we are asked to produce work that is not up to our quality standards. Typically this is because of deadlines. We know that a lack of quality will cause us problems now (documents that are hard to understand, possibly misinterpreted, and documents that are hard to [...]

Why should you use requirement models? Isn’t it faster to just start listing the functional requirements? In this post I’ll explain why you shouldn’t do that – and why requirement models are so powerful. Provide ContextYou cannot pick up a list of 500 system shall statements and quickly get a grasp of what the system [...]

I was driving somewhere with my 2-year old daugther the other day when she started asking me questions. More specifically, she asked me one question, “Why are their no clouds today?” I quickly gave an answer, and (those of you with kids know where I’m going with this) she proceeded to follow up every answer [...]

I read a post recently in the Austin Product Managment Yahoo Group stating that Product Managers should not know their products. The author’s theory is that PdM’s who know their product will not be able to effectively manage their product. “In a nutshell, the more product knowledge you have, the less product management you’re doing [...]