Jeremy Jarrell • Tuesday, January 5, 2021 • Productivity

What Chess Can Teach You About Product Management

Chess — the game of kings. For most, chess is a lifelong journey, a skill crafted over years of study. But, unlike most chess enthusiasts, I didn’t discover chess until well into adulthood…and several years after I jumped into the field of Product Management. However, this late discovery afforded me the chance to recognize the parallels between this ancient game and the emergent field of technology Product Management. Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell • Friday, May 29, 2020 • Productivity

INVEST Questions Are More Than Just Yes Or No

It’s no secret that agile teams thrive on collaboration. So much so, that this phrase has been echoed as a warning against over-detailing stories for decades. But, even the most agile-leaning teams tend to benefit from some refinement to their stories to create clarity on what the team is trying to achieve with those stories. Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell • Monday, March 9, 2020 • Productivity

Focusing On Predictability Over Velocity

One of the challenges that organizations who are new to agile often face is a perceived loss of insight into their teams’ progress. After all, if an agile approach asks teams to forego the creation of a detailed upfront plan then how will that organization know if their teams are on track? Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell • Monday, August 26, 2019 • Productivity

Shorter Iterations are always best...and Other Lies you’ve been Told

The prevailing belief that shorter iterations are always better for all teams is a fallacy. While both shorter and longer iterations have their own benefits, the right choice for your team depends more on the product that your team is building and where it is in its lifecycle. Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell • Monday, August 12, 2019 • Productivity

Measuring the Business Value of your Stories

Many agile teams have become obsessed with speed. How fast can we release? How fast can we close stories? How fast can we deliver to market? What too few fail to realize, however, is that none of this speed matters unless what the team is delivering is actually providing value to their organization. Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell • Tuesday, July 30, 2019 • Productivity

What to do when Individuals are Unhappy in their own Teams...Or the Fallacy of Team Rotation

Even with all the benefits agile offers, some individuals may be unhappy or even feel trapped in their current team assignment. In fact, it may even seem as if we encounter this more after teams begin following an agile approach. However, there are actually two, very legitimate, reasons for this. Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell • Monday, July 15, 2019 • Productivity

Getting Started With Agile: Putting Agile to Work for You

In this final installment for the Getting Started With Agile series, we’ll discuss concrete strategies for applying each of the values so you can put these ideas into play with your own team. Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell • Monday, July 1, 2019 • Productivity

Why Traditional Reports Don't Work In An Agile Environment

If you’ve ever worked on an agile project, then you’ve probably realized that the types of reporting that are beneficial to an agile team are very different than those that are beneficial to a traditional team. Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell • Thursday, March 28, 2019 • Productivity

Getting Started With Agile: Responding to Change Over Following a Plan

In this installment, we’ll discuss how you can learn from your product development process so your team can benefit from that learning along the way. Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell • Wednesday, February 6, 2019 • Productivity

Spotting the Dark Matter Tasks on Your Team

Ever get the feeling that your team is working on more than what’s actually in the backlog? Even with the best laid plans, there are still many tasks that can lie between the cracks, distracting your team from the work at hand. Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell • Wednesday, January 16, 2019 • Productivity

Vanity Metrics: They’re Not Just for Your Product

While vanity metrics are often associated with your product, that’s not their only use. In fact, vanity metrics crop up in all aspects of product development, including in your product development process Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell • Tuesday, November 20, 2018 • Productivity

Setting a Goal for Your Iteration

Too often, the set of stories that teams select for their iteration has no overarching theme or focus. In fact, while these stories may be individually valuable, at times their selection can appear almost random. Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell • Monday, October 15, 2018 • Productivity

Prioritizing Across the Themes in Your Product

Prioritizing a single set of work for your team can be hard; prioritizing work across multiple sets of work can be nearly impossible. Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell • Tuesday, September 4, 2018 • Productivity

Getting Started With Agile: Customer Collaboration Over Contract Negotiation

In this installment, we’ll discuss what benefits can be achieved from working to build relationships with your customers and aligning those customers with your team, rather than pitting those groups against one another. Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell • Thursday, August 2, 2018 • Productivity

Dividing and Conquering: Finding the Right Size for Your Team

While it may seem surprising, simply increasing the size of an already successful team is not guaranteed to increase that team’s success and it may even put that team’s chances of future success in jeopardy. Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell • Thursday, June 28, 2018 • Productivity

How to Use Blocking and Tackling for a Great Iteration Planning Meeting Every Time

Backlog refinement is a practice intended to help you keep the top of your backlog in a refined state so you can have better iteration planning sessions. But despite the value backlog refinement can yield, there is no officially prescribed approach for how to do it. However, if you’re looking for a simple way to introduce this practice to your team, then don’t despair: there’s an easy approach that you can use with your team today. Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell • Thursday, May 17, 2018 • Productivity

Getting Started With Agile: Delivering Real Value to Your Users

In this installment, we’ll discuss the importance of delivering working, usable software to your users over simply delivering reams of documentation. Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell • Monday, April 9, 2018 • Productivity

Starting Your Team on the Right Foot with Team Chartering

One of the best things that you can do to help your team deliver great products is to make sure your entire team is starting off on the right foot. Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell • Monday, March 12, 2018 • Productivity

How to INVEST in Your User Stories

If you’re a product manager, user stories are a critical part of how you interact with your team. Nothing trumps a face-to-face conversation, but the key to starting that conversation is a good story. Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell • Monday, January 29, 2018 • Productivity

Getting Started With Agile: Growing Great Agile Teams

In this installment, we’ll begin diving into the four foundational values of the agile manifesto to better understand the reasoning behind today’s most popular agile methodologies. Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell • Monday, January 8, 2018 • Productivity

Can Your Iteration Length Change in the Middle of Your Project?

Most agile teams work in iterations, especially those teams that follow a cadenced approach, such as scrum. And why not, since an iteration-based approach provides many advantages to teams. But while there’s little argument concerning the value of iterations, finding the right iteration length for a team is no small feat. Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell • Thursday, December 14, 2017 • Productivity

Keeping Your Team on Track

One of the most striking things that nearly all highly effective teams have in common is a small—but reasonable—set of clearly defined goals for each iteration. Rather than obsessing over secondary metrics, such as the number of stories closed or the total number of points completed, successful teams measure their success by their ability to deliver on the goals they set for themselves at the beginning of the iteration. Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell • Friday, November 17, 2017 • Productivity

Getting Started With Agile: Understanding the Need for Agile

This post is the first in a series that we’re introducing to get back to the basics of agile and help you understand where these methodologies that have been so successful actually originate from. Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell • Thursday, October 19, 2017 • Productivity

Embracing Evil with Evil User Stories

If you’re like most product managers, you probably have a backlog full of user stories representing just what you’d like to see your best users do with your product. But what about your not so great users? Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell • Thursday, October 5, 2017 • Productivity

Velocity Is Not the Goal

How is my team doing? How much have they done? Inevitably, after your team starts to make progress using an agile methodology, you’ll find yourself wanting to measure that progress. And as soon as you start to look at how to measure agile teams, you’ll encounter velocity. Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell • Monday, September 11, 2017 • Productivity

Choosing the Right Iteration Length

One of the most common questions facing teams that are new to agile is, “What’s the right iteration length for our team?” Although this question can seem daunting at first, there’s actually a simple way to find the answer. Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell • Monday, August 7, 2017 • Productivity

Splitting Stories Across Teams

If you are releasing a feature across both platforms, you may originally start with that feature described as a single user story but then split the story in two as each team tackles their respective implementations. Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell • Monday, July 17, 2017 • Productivity

How to Get More Out of Your Iteration Review

Is your iteration review just a dog-and-pony show for your stakeholders? If so, then you may be missing out on one your most important opportunities to ensure that you’re on track to delivering a great product. Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell • Wednesday, June 14, 2017 • Productivity

Finding the Right Amount of Backlog Refinement

Many product managers struggle with getting the right level of detail in their backlog. If the backlog is too vaguely defined, then your team picks up stories that aren’t immediately actionable, which can slow them down. On the other hand, if the backlog is too well defined, then it becomes rigid and fails to evolve as your product takes shape. Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell • Monday, June 5, 2017 • Productivity

Choosing the Best Slice of Your Story

Learning to split large user stories into smaller user stories is one of the best things a team can do to improve their workflow. Not only are smaller stories easier to understand—and therefore easier to estimate—but their smaller size makes them inherently less risky for a team to take on. Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell • Monday, May 15, 2017 • Productivity

The Daily Standup is a Planning Meeting—Not a Status Meeting

The Daily Standup is a core practice of successful teams and one of the first practices that most teams adopt as they seek to improve their collaboration. But despite its prominence, many teams struggle to grasp the point of this event. Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell • Wednesday, May 3, 2017 • Productivity

Three Ways Product Managers Can Help with a Great Iteration Planning Meeting

A great iteration planning meeting (IPM) sets the tone for the entire iteration. Your team leaves the session energized, excited, and with a clear picture of how to hit the ground running in the new iteration. But, what if things don’t go as well as you’d hoped? Then your team will leave the session tired and frustrated. They will leave without a clear idea of how to get started on their new set of work. They may even leave without any idea of what their goal for the next iteration even is. Read more...