Uniting Agile, Strategy, and Jobs-to-be-Done There’s a tug-a-war going on across three interrelated topics. Each drives superb product development. Yet the three topics act independently. The Approaches The Agile approach is found in every corner of product development. Its first mission was to uncover a new way to develop software successfully. But following its success, […]
The Need for Responsive Roadmapping Agile implementations have a big problem. When they bump up against an organization’s culture, progress can stop. It turns out, behaviors and practices can be a brick wall. To me, it’s humorous to hear experts say Agile’s full benefits accrue only from “transformative implementations.” They declare an organization, from top […]
Where is Roadmapping Taking Us? Roadmapping has been on quite a journey. Many managers use the term to describe planning and tracking projects. But they use different schemes to create roadmaps. And the results vary widely. There’s much to learn from roadmapping’s evolution. This is especially true for innovation management and product development in big […]
Interested in Product Line Strategy and Roadmaps? Can you name a successful company without a powerful product line? What about a company that failed because a product line died? It’s easy to see the impact product lines have on business health. The problem is that good product line strategy gets lost in the culture of […]
Go Beyond Single Product Innovation Look over a few articles on innovation. Are they about innovating one product at a time or whole product lines? This is important because a product line has far more impact in business than does a single product. It’s time to think much bigger. It’s time to push full product […]
I have a simple message for managers who oversee product development portfolios. Portfolio Balance is Misguided. The problem is no one knows what the balance must be. Instead, we make it up. That’s right, the gurus and experts make up numbers to impress you. Portfolio balance is BS. It would seem portfolio balance should guide […]
New Words and Business Knowledge Decades ago, most MBA curriculum followed the Harvard Business School approach. Each had a capstone course called Policy, taught in the classic Socratic method. Good professors fed students cases and then used leading questions to set up deep discussions. For many students like me, the discussions taught more than we’d […]
The Missing Linchpin to Product Line Strategy Most managers and executives know fast product development helps successful outcomes. There are two reasons for the push for speed. First, fast development is more efficient and less costly. And second, the sooner you launch a product, the better your competitive position. While there’s not a 100% correlation […]
The Profound Impact of Product Line Strategy In my book and Masterclasses, I lay out a strong framework for product line strategies. I complement this with an easily understood lexicon. Together, the framework and lexicon are important to gaining greater impact from product lines. And they’re not just for product line teams. Let me explain […]
What’s not a Product-lever in Product Line Strategy When teaching product line strategy, I hear managers argue about what is and isn’t a platform-lever. To aid the discussion I offer two quick tests. The first test is whether the factor in question can cut across cross multiple products. The second test is whether the factor […]
Adept Group 2021
