Experiences

5 Pros and Cons of combining the CTO and CPO roles

(My experience working at this “CPTO” role for the last two years) Depending on company age, industry, and evolution, they have very different structures for their product development organizations. Since going into the details of those different scenarios may require a very long article, I want to focus on companies that are in a situation similar […]

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5 ways to dramatically accelerate your product development speed

By reducing maintenance cost I dedicated my last article to expose the pervasive effect of maintenance cost on product development speed. (I recommend reading it first to further understand the concepts discussed in this one) But it would not be complete without some recommendations on how to keep it as low as possible. Let’s review 5

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The ugly truth about why your product development team is so slow

There is a particular problem most companies struggle with: as time goes by, product development teams seem to get slower and slower. Why? Why those great developers that at first seemed to deliver tremendous value now take so long to make small changes? We can list many reasons: Dependencies: as the team grows, we split

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What is the real difference between Project and Product Organizations?

My last 2 work experiences were on companies that were trying to move from a project based organization to a product based organization. Being a “product person” I love this challenge. But I found out that there were many myths about what the Project vs Product difference really is about. For instance, I heard the

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My Top 5 challenges of Product Management and Development — Part V

Alignment, Goal Setting and Bonuses Note: This is part 5 of a 5 part series, I highly recommend reading previous parts if you haven’t. You can read the first one here. One of the highest impact activities at management levels is goal setting. Defining an appropriate process and standards can create the right environment for teams

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My Top 5 challenges of Product Management and Development — Part IV

Roadmaps and stakeholder communication Note: This is part IV of a 5 part series, I highly recommend reading previous parts if you havent. You can read the first one here. I feel I’m cheating with this challenge because both Roadmap and Stakeholders can have their own separate chapters. But the combination of creating a useful, updated,

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My Top 5 challenges of Product Management and Development — Part III

Recruiting talent, defining career paths and maintaining “balanced” teams Note: this is part III of a 5 part series. You can find the 1st here, and 2nd here. I choose talent as my third big challenge. There are obvious difficulties in hiring the non-abundant technical talent: high salary demands, high “benefits” demands, having interesting and challenging technologies/products… and I

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My Top 5 challenges of Product Management and Development — Part II

Fostering a culture of outcomes, discovery, and experimentation Note: this is the second part of a 5-part series on Product challenges. If you haven’t already read the first part you can find it here. My second biggest product challenge is related to aligning the entire organization towards a culture of outcomes, discovery, and experimentation. Let split

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