Posts

With Team Topologies, Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais aim to reduce the complexity of tech organizations to four team types and three modes of interaction. The end goal is to help teams produce software that aligns with customer needs and is easier to build, run, and own. (Skelton & Pais) Framework-Influences One of the central theses is that software architectures and the way teams interact are closely connected. This can be attributed to Conway’s Law, which states that an organization’s communication structures influence its software architecture. ...

What is the best way to split a cross-functional product development team? Here are six approaches with their respective pros and cons. 1. Feature Teams A cross-functional team with the end-to-end ownership of a feature. For example, an e-commerce checkout process or product recos. The members of the feature team work directly on all code bases required to further develop the feature, even if they are not responsible for that part of the software system themselves. ...

Product Repo is my personal, curated collection of product management articles that I find worth reading. The list is organized into categories such as product-led growth, strategy, leadership, product management fundamentals and many more. You can find it here: https://github.com/sischreiber/product-repo/ It’s essentially a GitHub readme file in my rather sparse repo, which I update sporadically whenever I come across noteworthy articles.

Glad to have my article on Mind the Product where I attempt to explain why we have a bias toward increasing the scope of our products, even though evidence suggests that subtracting features can increase the overall value for users, customers and the business. https://www.mindtheproduct.com/the-irony-of-product-led-growth/

Software engineers don’t go to product managers to understand how to build a software application. But when engineers start sharing their knowledge about product, there is often something in those words. Especially when the authors have left a footprint in the tech industry. Joel Spolsky on the Worst Possible Strategic Mistake Joel Spolsky is one of the co-founders of Stack Overflow. Although he has hardly posted on “Joel on Software” for years, there are several timeless articles worth reading. One of them is “Things You Should Never Do, Part I” from 2000. It is about a specific strategic mistake in the tech industry and why the cause lies in the rule of thumb that code is harder to read than to write. ...

Gatekeepers say no to everything. Proxies give a yes to every idea. How do you find the right balance? The Problem With Saying No There are hundreds of articles online about how and why product managers should say no. In this context, negating refers to stakeholder requests that aim to change the scope of a product. In the short term, product managers get some breathing room by rejecting requests. A frequently encountered quote comes from Warren Buffett: Saying no to almost everything is a characteristic of successful people. This may apply to many professions. But also if your focus is on user-driven products? ...

How writing declaratively improves team collaboration and ultimately the product. https://www.mindtheproduct.com/the-advantages-of-declarative-user-stories/

Headless CMS offer numerous advantages over traditional monolithic CMS, especially in a cloud-native stack. As is often the case, vendors’ product marketing only mentions the advantages. After two headless CMS projects, I have summarized the pitfalls to watch out for on HackerNoon: https://hackernoon.com/what-they-dont-tell-you-about-headless-cms

Sprints in Scrum need to be planned conscientiously. The personnel costs of an average sprint are easily in the five-digit range. Published on the Product Coalition, one of the largest product management communities: https://productcoalition.com/the-economics-of-sprint-planning-b20082d5e24e

How I built my previous portfolio website with Hugo static site generator and hosted it on GitHub. The nice thing about this setup is that there are no costs other than the domain. My site looks different now but the setup is identical: https://medium.com/the-kickstarter/how-to-create-a-product-portfolio-website-with-hugo-and-github-28daa950939c