A well-formed product strategy is a beacon that guides navigation in the open space between product vision and what’s being developed. It needs to be flexible to account for the unavoidable uncertainties along the way and not deteriorate into a rigid plan or roadmap.

Dear all, are we going after the right priorities when it comes to delivering IT projects or digital products? Coaching teams regularly, I remain doubtful. The underlying challenge – to my mind – is often the lack of a clear intention (the WHY) and a rather narrow...

Dear all, this issue of weekend reading could save you tons of money. If you are following the US news, you may have read about the "COVID discount rates" that a management consultancy successfully sold to the US government for their advice in the pandemic. Times are...

Dear all, some of you know that I am prone to railing against committee-prioritized feature lists for software projects, in particular when to be developed by supposedly ‘self-organizing’ agile teams. The situation usually improves somewhat when we can make the...

Dear all, OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are spreading like wildfire. Someone just called them the 2nd most influential movement in the Palo Alto hills after ‚Love and Peace‘. Or something to the effect. And for good reason. In our pandemic world many businesses’...

Dear all, some of you know that I am a pretty big fan of Steve Blank’s, Silicon Valley entrepreneur and one of the founders of the Lean Startup movement. He's recently been interviewed by Martin Reeves, Managing Director of BCG's Henderson Institute. Even though the...

Dear all, My apologies I am late this week. Projects taking more time than originally planned. You’ve probably been there… On my subject for the weekend: Working with multiple teams, I get to look at a reasonable number of backlogs. Everybody refers to their content...

Dear all, recent tragic events in the US, as well as the outrage and subsequent discussions triggered by them, should have brought it home to us that equality and diversity are still an issue in our society and businesses. As father of two daughters in their early...

Some managers are retreating in the current uncertainty: hierarchical leadership styles are re-emerging, desires to painstakingly project-plan increasing – recipes of an industrial past for an even more VUCA (and digital!) world ahead. I would like to promote a different model driven by the power of a shared vision, the creativity of teams of peers, and the impact of blameless post mortems to promote organizational learning.

Dear all, as we currently support three client projects in more or less (no pun intended) scaling agile environments, I did recently familiarise myself with LeSS – Large Scale Scrum – again. And I was baffled once more by its mind blowing simplicity and consequence....

Dear all, Between business calls this AM, I had a conversation with a friend of mine. In between the usual topics from how we are coping in our home offices to our motorbikes, we chatted about the situation of our respective companies in the current crisis. I could...

this morning my wife and me had a conversation over breakfast about the most recent WFH (work from home) announcements by Facebook and others and what they meant for people and their collaboration. Apart from the lack of informal "coffee maker" interaction that all of...

Dear all, Am I the only one who’s eyes are turning square in the pandemic? This week I could hardly stand looking at screens anymore. Working on our digital product (more on that soon), Zoom calls with clients and partners, webinars – it felt increasingly dizzying....

Dear all, My apologies, I am late this week. Between work on the syllabus for my new course “Strategic Business Model Innovation” that I will be teaching this fall, attending (part of) a virtual conference, and some personal errands, there was just not enough time...

Dear all, a night ago a Tweet from Marty Cagan popped up in my feed in between the meanwhile somewhat boring threads about how to do product discovery remotely in times of Corona etc.. It referenced a post he had written in response to Jeremiah Lee's somewhat...