In this month’s newsletter we talk about backlog grooming, the value of Upstream Kanban and why you should definitely try Kanban if you’re in Product Management.
Kanban – The Product Manager’s BFF!
The Product Manager’s job is easily one of the most challenging. On one hand, you need to figure out what to build. On the other hand, in any reasonably mature product organization, there is so much work going on and so much new demand, that defects and customer demand pretty much hijack most of the capacity in the organization.
If you find this situation familiar, this article, by Mahesh Singh on how Kanban can help, is definitely worth a read.
The Value Of Upstream Kanban For Backlog Grooming
Most Agile literature starts with a “groomed backlog”. But how do we get to it? This has been largely left to the domain of the Product Owner. Somehow, quite magically, groomed stories arrive in the backlog – that are functionally clear, small, testable, independent and most importantly, implementable. But, what happens when the magic fails?
In this article, Sudipta Lahiri describes various scenarios that demonstrate the value of Upstream Kanban for backlog grooming.
Aligning Strategy To Execution
How do your product teams evaluate options and ensure that they commit to the right set of features? How do you understand why you are doing what you are doing, and ensure that your work gets to you in the right level of detail, in the right priority and at (just) the right time? In this article, Mahesh Singh explains how Upstream Kanban can ease the challenge leadership has in understanding what, if anything, is being done against the strategic objectives that the whole organization agreed to at the start of the quarter.
We also conducted a webinar recently with the folks over at SquirrelNorth on Product Management in Kanban. In case you missed it, you can access the recording and slides here – we guarantee you’ll walk away with multiple ideas to try out.
If you’re looking for a tool to help you with Kanban for Product Management, you should probably check out SwiftKanban. It’s Upstream Kanban features enable product teams to evaluate options and ensure that they commit to the right set of features. The Discard and Abort analysis offers a data-driven direction to waste analysis and helps you better manage end-to-end flow in the product.
The add-on SwiftESP module helps you define a Risk Assessment Framework where you can use Kiviat charts to define your Risk Dimensions and select key initiatives or features to execute based on their risk profile. And if you are used to it, we also have a powerful Story Mapping module that helps you map a user’s journey and break it down to epics and user stories to be grouped into sprints and releases.
Webinar: Untangling Business Processes Through the Kanban Lens
We invite you to attend a webinar we’re conducting with Dr. Andy Carmichael, co-author, with David Anderson of “Essential Kanban Condensed” (2016), on how Kanban – in particular, the “Kanban Lens” – helped untangle the complex web of interactions that formed the business processes of the IT department of a large research hospital. It’s on the 28th, do join us.
