You will never have enough time or people to do everything you want. We know that focusing on everything prevents you from getting anything done. You need to make hard decisions about what work is most important. Often these decisions will frustrate both your customers and your employees. However, ask yourself this:
Would you rather have an honest conversation about what’s important and make a decision, or pretend and have everyone even more frustrated at the end when nothing is done?
To succeed, you need to understand your purpose and the value that you deliver for your customers. You need to make sure what people are working on actually aligns with that purpose. The work throughout the organization must be visible if you want people to make sound business decisions. People often say that this sounds obvious. We agree, it is obvious – but how to do it is often not.
Every organization is different, and there are patterns that we see over and over. Customer and product problems are often difficult to tackle because they cross so many departmental and organizational boundaries. Challenges in the product and customer space often feel overwhelming with no clear starting point. We focus on ‘the work’ and help you zoom in on the most important priorities to build from there. Shifting from current challenges to a new, better future is about incremental improvements.
Remember, there is no silver bullet! Start improving, one product at a time.
Amazing Product Management Training (includes CSPO®)
Take a deep dive into what it means to be a Agile Product Manager (or Scrum Product Owner). Learn what a Product Manager/Owner does and how their responsibilities differ from and may replace those of a traditional project manager. Experience the process of working through a project request, extracting customer needs, features, and refining those features into small backlog items! Ask tough questions and learn with practical concepts you can apply. Throughout this course, expect to learn in engaging exercises and simulations as a class and in small groups.
Amazing Product Management: Advanced:
Go deeper into the skills that move products and priorities in the real world. Learn how to define and evolve product strategy, manage multiple business initiatives while keeping stakeholders aligned, and advance techniques for ordering and refining your backlog. You’ll develop stakeholder relationship management skills, understand the dynamics of competing interests, and practice communicating effectively when everyone wants something different. You’ll work with the critical distinction between outcome and output, so you stay focused on value instead of just delivery. Real scenarios under time pressure help you develop the judgment that separates good product managers from great ones.
Lean Project Management
Projects fail because you’re trying to plan things you don’t know yet. You’re planning in a bubble without visibility into all the other initiatives competing for resources. Execution breaks down because of poor coordination, invisible delays, waste, and inability to adjust when reality doesn’t match your plan. Learn how to break projects into work that teams can actually complete, eliminate waste and invisible delays, keep work visible so you can adjust course, and manage constraints (time, people, resources) realistically. Discover how to talk to executives about planning in a more effective and less wasteful way — moving away from command-and-control planning toward adaptive delivery. You’ll discover how to deliver value incrementally instead of delaying all the value and possibly never achieving it, and how to keep stakeholders engaged so decisions move forward.
Reach Out
Contact us with any questions, to ask how we might help you with specific goals or challenges, or even see a live demo of our training. Or feel free to