Anti-Patterns Archives - Page 2 of 2

Stop Obsessing Over Development Velocity, Focus on This Instead

Anti-Patterns, Prioritization, Product Discovery, Product Operating Model

An awful lot of effort is going these days into boosting product teams’ productivity: getting them to burn those story points faster, deliver the planned scope in every sprint and cycle, and generally ship more stuff, faster. The term “development velocity” is often thrown around by executives, but what they’re actually aiming for is upping […]

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5 Ways Your Company May Be Misusing OKRs

Anti-Patterns, Goals and OKRs, Product Operating Model

UPDATE: I published a free eBook that covers OKRs best practices and pitfalls in-depth: OKRs Done Right. Since their invention at Intel in the early 1970s, Objectives and Key Results have amassed a huge following. It certainly helps that Google, Amazon, Dropbox and other tech super-companies attribute so much of their success to them. John

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Escaping the Vicious Cycle of Plan & Execute

Anti-Patterns, Frameworks and Tools, Product Operating Model, Roadmaps and Planning

Tell me if this sounds familiar: Well-thought-out strategies change seemingly every other quarter. 9-month projects that take two years to complete. Disgruntled managers talking about “low velocity”, “lack of ‘can do’ culture”. Skeptical employees talking about lack of vision, bad planning, politics. Spending lots of time on planning, replanning, scope-downs Disappointing launches that customers generally

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Why The Impact Effort Prioritization Matrix Doesn’t Work

Anti-Patterns, Prioritization

The Impact/Effort matrix is a classic product managment tool, helping to prioritize product ideas. See why often it doesn’t work correctly and how to fix.

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