12 Top Posts for Agile Product Managers

The fourth episode of 5 Minutes with @NYIke covers the role of product management. I take on the challenge of defining the role's strategic responsibilities and illustrating how product managers should best work with agile teams.

Please note that the video focuses on Product Managers chartered with developing customer-facing applications and products. There's a very different way to think about this role for internal applications, though many of the responsibilities are the same.

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Leading a Defensive to Offensive Transformation Strategy Post COVID-19

There is something quite magical watching pro athletes in a one on one situation. A soccer player defending a striker from getting by or a basketball player holding ground so that the point guard doesn't drive to the basket.

These players are on their toes and ready to pounce left or right, depending on where they think the offensive player will drive. They want to avoid overcommitting in one direction and getting deeked the other way. They have to defend against a move, a shot, or a pass, so all their senses are hyper-focused. They have to watch the player, track the ball, and read the offensive player's intention.

It helps to know the context. What does the player in front of them like to do under these game circumstances? Where are they on the field or court, what's the score, and how much time is left?

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Four Agile Workstreams in a Data Driven Organization

In this episode of 5 Minutes with @NYIke, I share a four-step process to start getting your organization more data-driven.

You can start with any of the four steps. Still, most organizations I know start with the one that I shared in the video - getting data scientists - and especially citizen data scientists - to ask questions and explore data.

Once you get started, the other steps will materialize, and it will likely evolve to a multi-workstream journey on changing the culture, introducing proactive data governance, instituting dataops, and introducing new data technologies.

You'll need agile data practices to iterate, process feedback, and prioritize activity.

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How Low Code Platforms Enable Remote Collaboration

As I said in my last post, the world took a hard pivot right over the last couple of weeks. I'm reasonably sure that whatever you had planned to do this week is crossed out and replaced with a new plan and way of working.

Many organizations closed their offices and working remotely. I ran a small poll on Twitter to snapshot the impact, and over 26% of respondents state that at least part of their organizations shifted to working remotely because of COVID-19.

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CIO Must Pivot to a Safer-Smarter World

My boss used to say to me, "Isaac, read the tea leaves" to get a sense of what to present, share, and focus on depending on the business temperament.

Just two weeks ago, I was keynoting to CIOs about investing in data governance, agile data practices, and changing the culture to prepare their organization for machine learning organizations. I reminded IT leaders that a competitive, digital world required smarter-faster organizations.

But today, the world is a different place to lead.

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What is DevOps in 5 Minutes with @NYIke

Agile without DevOps can lead to conflict where agile teams want to deploy frequently but are slowed down by operations that preserve reliability over speed.

DevOps without agile leads to teams focusing on systems, automation, and technology first and often at the detriment of capabilities and features required by customers and end-users.

Transformation-driven organizations need both Agile (yes, a capital A!) and DevOps which is why my first episode of 5 Minutes with @NYIke focused on What is Agile Planning and now the second is on What is DevOps.

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What is Proactive Data Governance?

If you go to most business leaders to discuss data governance, you are likely to get a glazing stare that screams, "What the heck are you talking about?" And then your mind races to figure out where to begin. Data policies? Data security? Data quality? Data cataloging? Master data management?

Let's face it, most business leaders even today have little understanding of data governance even with all the headlines around regulations, privacy, data security, data breaches, algorithm bias, and the impacts of poor data quality.

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