Here are the questions from the chat:
Q: How do you prioritize technical debt pay down vs new features?
A: There's no single right answer, but some things to consider:
- Understand impact of TD on future development
- Estimate effort for TD vs features
- Involve engineers in prioritization
- Set minimum TD paydown each cycle
- Consider TD that enables new features
- Balance long term health with short term wins
Q: How do you estimate technical debt?
A: A few common ways to estimate technical debt:
- Subjective rating (high, medium, low) of code quality issues
- Time estimates to refactor or fix specific code smells
Portfolio prioritization with lean canvas and value game for PMI Buffalo NY C...Mike Caspar
Summary:
Projects are too often prioritized based on opinions and politics. Use the Lean Canvas, a one-page business plan, and the Business Value Game for rigorous prioritization.
Learning Objectives:
How to use the Lean Canvas to articulate critical project parameters
How to use the Business Value Game to prioritize different projects
Lean Development Practices for Enterprise AgileTechWell
Enterprise agile initiatives require strategic, portfolio, product, and team perspectives at all levels. Alan Shalloway has found that lean software development principles help integrate all of these perspectives into a cohesive, actionable whole. With a combination of lean science, lean management, lean team, and lean learning methods, Alan shows how your organization can prepare for enterprise agility. Lean science focuses on the “laws” present in all software development projects. Lean management empowers executives to contribute to the context within which teams can flourish. Lean team methods are actualized in Kanban approaches. Lean learning empowers everyone in the organization to improve his skills and practices. Alan shows how you can make these four perspectives work together so that enterprise software development teams build the right software in the right way and continue to improve their practices along the way.
Syllabus for a ten week, four unit course based upon Steve Blank's Lean Launchpad Curriculum, taught at University of California, Santa Barbara, Winter Quarter 2013. Student teams validated business models by conducting more than 80 customer and partner interviews per team during an 8-week period. Out-of-the building market validation was supplemented by weekly live lectures and the use of Blank's online "Lean Launchpad" video course at Udacity.com to provide students with a flipped-classroom, experiential approach to learning how to create a viable business model.
Portfolio prioritization with lean canvas and value game for PMI Buffalo NY C...Mike Caspar
Summary:
Projects are too often prioritized based on opinions and politics. Use the Lean Canvas, a one-page business plan, and the Business Value Game for rigorous prioritization.
Learning Objectives:
How to use the Lean Canvas to articulate critical project parameters
How to use the Business Value Game to prioritize different projects
Lean Development Practices for Enterprise AgileTechWell
Enterprise agile initiatives require strategic, portfolio, product, and team perspectives at all levels. Alan Shalloway has found that lean software development principles help integrate all of these perspectives into a cohesive, actionable whole. With a combination of lean science, lean management, lean team, and lean learning methods, Alan shows how your organization can prepare for enterprise agility. Lean science focuses on the “laws” present in all software development projects. Lean management empowers executives to contribute to the context within which teams can flourish. Lean team methods are actualized in Kanban approaches. Lean learning empowers everyone in the organization to improve his skills and practices. Alan shows how you can make these four perspectives work together so that enterprise software development teams build the right software in the right way and continue to improve their practices along the way.
Syllabus for a ten week, four unit course based upon Steve Blank's Lean Launchpad Curriculum, taught at University of California, Santa Barbara, Winter Quarter 2013. Student teams validated business models by conducting more than 80 customer and partner interviews per team during an 8-week period. Out-of-the building market validation was supplemented by weekly live lectures and the use of Blank's online "Lean Launchpad" video course at Udacity.com to provide students with a flipped-classroom, experiential approach to learning how to create a viable business model.
Balancing the tension between Lean and AgileJames Coplien
Many people equate Lean and agile or claim that one is a subset of the other. In fact, they have almost opposite emphases: thinking versus doing; teams versus individuals; planning versus reacting; and many more. This talk will help you clarify the distinction in a way that will help you focus soberly on how to improve your environment, team, product and process, by going beyond the buzzwords to the fundamental building blocks.
It covers ATDD, BDD, UTDD, Lean & Kanban, Technical debt, Value focus & many more.
Every year, world wide Agile Annual Conferences takes place & Synerzip's CEO & CTO use to attend it & bring key takeaways over the years.
Original copy at https://www.synerzip.com/webinar/agile2011-conference-key-take-aways-2011/
What is Technical Debt? It doesn't have to be negative, but it does have to be carefully managed. Here is a quick run-down of best practice to approaching Technical Debt management.
Technical debt is inevitable in applications development and many organizations and teams struggle to manage it – when to take it on, when to avoid it and when and how to pay it down.
Agile practices continue to improve as organizations move forward with adoption and adaption. However, as they move forward, they often run into daunting challenges—coordinating projects with highly complex requirements and interdependencies; navigating highly political environments; and finding ways to fund, report, and integrate agile project work into existing organizational processes. Jamie Mades has found that the Lean Agile Portfolio bridges these gaps, applying lean product development flow principles to identify high-value initiatives and speed completion of work. It reduces risk and uncertainty using agile development practices to realize those initiatives. Jamie discusses how to break down silos across all areas, reduce the divide between agile practices and senior executive requirements, and improve collaboration. Using a $500M portfolio at a Fortune 100 company as an example, he reviews how they seamlessly integrated agile planning into the annual funding cycle and coordinated highly complex work across the organization. Join Jamie to learn where you need to drive changes and where you can adapt agile practices to meet organizational needs.
Case Study: Outsourcing in hybrid model Krish Singh
This case study is about Entellects' capabilities for software services. Entellects has expertise in not only software services but we can also outsource personnel software resources for IT and non-IT companies based on our clients requirements.
Доклад: “Secrets of Selling Your Global Software Development Services”
Многие из вас наверняка являются экспертами в области программного обеспечения, может быть даже считают себя гениями. Но технические гении не отличаются хорошими навыками в области продаж.
Этот доклад будет посвящен секретам успешных продаж услуг по разработке программного обеспечения, в частности клиентам из Северной Америки. Важно правильно оценить ваши шансы и перспективы и суметь убедить покупателя в том, что именно вы будете для него лучшим разработчиком. Из доклада вы узнаете, как использовать современные маркетинговые технологии для демонстрации ваших возможностей и убеждения клиентов.
Конечно, хорошо быть гением. Но кроме ваших родных и близких кто нибудь об этом знает?
A presentation by Carolyn Limbert, made at the APM South Wales and West of England branch seminar 'Project Controls: A 1 day Seminar' on Wednesday, 2nd October 2013
Leading DevOps Application Release and Deployment - Best Practices for Organi...IBM UrbanCode Products
Explore the emerging best practices for leading organizational change to adopt application release and deployment. A variety of principles & practices will be described and illustrated through actual client cases.
Balancing the tension between Lean and AgileJames Coplien
Many people equate Lean and agile or claim that one is a subset of the other. In fact, they have almost opposite emphases: thinking versus doing; teams versus individuals; planning versus reacting; and many more. This talk will help you clarify the distinction in a way that will help you focus soberly on how to improve your environment, team, product and process, by going beyond the buzzwords to the fundamental building blocks.
It covers ATDD, BDD, UTDD, Lean & Kanban, Technical debt, Value focus & many more.
Every year, world wide Agile Annual Conferences takes place & Synerzip's CEO & CTO use to attend it & bring key takeaways over the years.
Original copy at https://www.synerzip.com/webinar/agile2011-conference-key-take-aways-2011/
What is Technical Debt? It doesn't have to be negative, but it does have to be carefully managed. Here is a quick run-down of best practice to approaching Technical Debt management.
Technical debt is inevitable in applications development and many organizations and teams struggle to manage it – when to take it on, when to avoid it and when and how to pay it down.
Agile practices continue to improve as organizations move forward with adoption and adaption. However, as they move forward, they often run into daunting challenges—coordinating projects with highly complex requirements and interdependencies; navigating highly political environments; and finding ways to fund, report, and integrate agile project work into existing organizational processes. Jamie Mades has found that the Lean Agile Portfolio bridges these gaps, applying lean product development flow principles to identify high-value initiatives and speed completion of work. It reduces risk and uncertainty using agile development practices to realize those initiatives. Jamie discusses how to break down silos across all areas, reduce the divide between agile practices and senior executive requirements, and improve collaboration. Using a $500M portfolio at a Fortune 100 company as an example, he reviews how they seamlessly integrated agile planning into the annual funding cycle and coordinated highly complex work across the organization. Join Jamie to learn where you need to drive changes and where you can adapt agile practices to meet organizational needs.
Case Study: Outsourcing in hybrid model Krish Singh
This case study is about Entellects' capabilities for software services. Entellects has expertise in not only software services but we can also outsource personnel software resources for IT and non-IT companies based on our clients requirements.
Доклад: “Secrets of Selling Your Global Software Development Services”
Многие из вас наверняка являются экспертами в области программного обеспечения, может быть даже считают себя гениями. Но технические гении не отличаются хорошими навыками в области продаж.
Этот доклад будет посвящен секретам успешных продаж услуг по разработке программного обеспечения, в частности клиентам из Северной Америки. Важно правильно оценить ваши шансы и перспективы и суметь убедить покупателя в том, что именно вы будете для него лучшим разработчиком. Из доклада вы узнаете, как использовать современные маркетинговые технологии для демонстрации ваших возможностей и убеждения клиентов.
Конечно, хорошо быть гением. Но кроме ваших родных и близких кто нибудь об этом знает?
A presentation by Carolyn Limbert, made at the APM South Wales and West of England branch seminar 'Project Controls: A 1 day Seminar' on Wednesday, 2nd October 2013
Leading DevOps Application Release and Deployment - Best Practices for Organi...IBM UrbanCode Products
Explore the emerging best practices for leading organizational change to adopt application release and deployment. A variety of principles & practices will be described and illustrated through actual client cases.
Cost of Delay: An Economic Approach to Decision MakingRoger Turnau
Cost of Delay is a lightweight approach to feature and product prioritization that asks a simple question: how much does it cost you not to have something? Reinertsen has said that Cost of Delay is the most important thing to quantify when producing a product. Great, but how do you start? How do you assign a dollar amount to something you have not built yet? How do we make sure that our teams focus on building the most important thing right now? This talk will give you the tools you need to understand Cost of Delay, as well as a set of techniques, from simple proxies to more sophisticated real-dollar analyses to help you understand the impact of delays on your organization.
How CDK, a Global Brand, Leveraged End-User Monitoring to Drive Customer Deli...AppDynamics
Monitoring of production is critical, but what you choose to monitor has a direct impact on the culture of a software development organization. At CDK Global, we focus on the end-user experience, and prioritize monitoring of their interactions with our applications. This has a direct effect of driving the culture within CDK of delivering customer delight as we continuously evolve our platform to provide world class services.
Making architectural changes of legacy applications is critical, but comes with risk that the unanticipated will happen. CDK utilizes AppDynamics to monitor key application performance metrics first, to ensure refactoring work is a benefit to our clients and sets the stage for the next evolution of our platform.
Key takeaways:
o Drive customer delight by focusing on the end-user experience in all steps of the development process
o Company culture has far reaching impact; carefully choose where to focus monitoring attention to build the culture you desire
o Software architectural evolution comes with risk; guarantee that all changes benefit the end-user by monitoring key performance metrics before you begin any major technology change
For more information, go to: www.appdynamics.com
Using Agile Approach with Fixed Budget ProjectsSynerzip
This webinar covers the best practices, alternative approaches for effectively using Agile in fixed budget projects.
Get to know more about Synerzip's upcoming webinars at https://www.synerzip.com/webinars/
Agile Project Failures: Root Causes and Corrective ActionsTechWell
Agile initiatives always begin with the best of intentions—accelerate delivery, better meet customer needs, or improve software quality. Unfortunately, some agile projects do not deliver on these expectations. If you want help to ensure the success of your agile project or get an agile project back on track, this session is for you. Jeff Payne discusses the most common causes of agile project failure and how you can avoid these issues—or mitigate their damaging effects. Poor project management, ineffective requirements development, failed communications, software development problems, and (non)agile testing can all contribute to project failure. Learn practical tips and techniques for identifying early warning signs that your agile project might be in trouble and how you can best get your project back on track. Gain the knowledge you need to guide your organization toward agile project implementations that serve the business and the stakeholders.
Making The Right Strategic Choices in Product PortfoliosRich Mironov
Software executives and software product managers focus first on putting the right products into their portfolios - since the primary drivers of market success are identifying the right markets, segments and customer problems to solve. Deciding what products to build, and their relative priority, is a top-down strategic process supported by metrics-driven engineering and program management
The Eight Building Blocks of Quote-to-Cash TransformationApttus
Just what does it take to be successful in Quote-to-Cash business transformation? From vision, to strategy, to technology, to metrics, hear one organization’s journey to deliver a true 360-degree view of the customer. Join this session and learn the eight building blocks of Quote-to-Cash business transformation.
Migrating Your Apps to the Cloud: How to do it and What to AvoidVMware Tanzu
Migrating your applications to the cloud can be a harrowing journey, one fraught with complexity and uncertainty. What’s required to succeed, above and beyond the right platform, are the right set of people, equipped with modern practices, to build and run cloud native applications with confidence.
Join Allison and Tom, from Pivotal's Application Transformation (AppTx) team, as they discuss what common problems arise when teams try to get their apps on the platform and the AppTx team approach to solving them.
Whether you have purchased PCF (Pivotal Cloud Foundry) or are of a mind to move your legacy applications to the cloud this webinar will help you understand:
● Why it’s imperative to have a small team dedicated to the application portfolio
● When to re-platform, modernize or rewrite an application
● Strategies to address the most common issues we see
Speakers:
Allison Willams, Pivotal Senior Solutions Architect
Tom Collings, Pivotal Advisory Solutions Architect
Agile Project Failures: Root Causes and Corrective ActionsTechWell
Agile initiatives always begin with the best of intentions—accelerate delivery, better meet customer needs, or improve software quality. Unfortunately, some agile projects do not deliver on these expectations. If you want help to ensure the success of your agile project or get an agile project back on track, this session is for you. Jeff Payne discusses the most common causes of agile project failure and how you can avoid these issues—or mitigate their damaging effects. Poor project management, ineffective requirements development, failed communications, software development problems, and (non)agile testing can all contribute to a failing project. Learn practical tips and techniques for identifying early warning signs that your agile project might be in trouble and how you can best get your project back on track. Gain the knowledge you need to guide your organization toward agile project implementations that serve the business and the stakeholders.
Design Thinking, Lean StartUp, Business model Canvas ou Agile? Quando usar uma abordagem? Em que momento mudamos de fase? Quais perguntas devemos fazer?
At some point MVP will be behind you. If you don’t provide a ‘Whole’ Product, then you don’t have a sustainable product.
This material is from a series of talks I've given to Product Managers and Developers at our own company and externally
Navigating the Build vs. Buy Decision for Your Finance Technology NeedsGotransverse
Something that vexes every finance and accounting organization is the challenge of managing your internal technology portfolio to meet the changing needs of your constantly changing company. Should you continue to patch that old system or buy something new? Should you use point solutions or broad-based platforms? How much is the right amount to invest and which direction has the highest ROI. Well, as it happens, the answer is, “it depends”. This event will focus on how to perform a build vs. buy analysis for finance and accounting automation projects covering these very issues, helping you form a coherent technology strategy, along with tactics for execution.
Agile Requirements Agile Philly HandoutsDoniel Wilson
Agile Requirements Management is about mitigating risk and considering trade-offs that can be made early in the planning process.
While Agile improves many components of software delivery, one constant struggle for development is being able to accurately discern what the customer wants. This discussion will address common pitfalls in the requirements management cycle.
Don will highlight risks and present several strategies to mitigate these risks to improve the ability to deliver the desired results and the value an agile team brings to the organization.
As the Managing Director of Revolutionary Performance Management, Inc., Don Wilson has analyzed, planned, and implemented technology strategies for top tier companies such as Sprint, Marriott, AARP, and most recently the American Chemical Society. He is a Certified Project Management Professional, a Certified Scrum Product Owner and a Certified Scrum Master. He has a reputation for reviving “troubled” projects, achieving successful outcomes, and exceeding expectations. He is known as the “project-whisperer” for his ability to navigate effortlessly between business and technical groups to identify unspoken requirements.
Read more about Don Wilson on the Agile Philly website for this event at: http://www.agilephilly.com/events/2014-agile-requirements or www.thinkrpm.com
Trends in B2B Marketing: A Crash Course in B2B Email CreativeHannah Flynn
Too often, email campaigns are seen as something that "just anyone" on your team can put together. But in today's attention economy, strong creative can be the defining factor that gets your email to stand out in the inbox.
Join Howard Sewell of Spear Marketing Group, a leading B2B agency, as he uses real-world examples to highlight tips, techniques and key principles that can make or break your campaigns.
Prove ROI and Make the Business Case for Industrial Content MarketingHannah Flynn
It's the plight of an industrial marketer: over the course of a 12-18 month long buying cycle, you make contact with a whole host of influencers who read your content...who may or may not actually work in purchasing. By the time the RFQ comes in, the original project might be completely different... and your initial point of contact may be long gone! Meanwhile, the purchase somehow takes place, and Sales claims all the glory. How is a marketer supposed to make the business case for better content marketing?
Join Achinta Mitra, Founder and President of Tiecas, Inc, as he explains how, despite the long, grueling buying cycle, you can prove the ROI of your content marketing... and win (or keep!) buy-in from your higher-ups.
Prove ROI and Make the Business Case for Industrial Content MarketingHannah Flynn
It's the plight of an industrial marketer: over the course of a 12-18 month long buying cycle, you make contact with a whole host of influencers who read your content...who may or may not actually work in purchasing. By the time the RFQ comes in, the original project might be completely different... and your initial point of contact may be long gone! Meanwhile, the purchase somehow takes place, and Sales claims all the glory. How is a marketer supposed to make the business case for better content marketing?
Join Achinta Mitra, Founder and President of Tiecas, Inc, as he explains how, despite the long, grueling buying cycle, you can prove the ROI of your content marketing... and win (or keep!) buy-in from your higher-ups.
Trends in B2B Marketing: Customer-Centric Websites: Successful Strategies to ...Hannah Flynn
Chances are, you’re under the gun to convert more leads from your website. To increase conversion, your site needs high-quality content, user-friendly navigation paths, and calls to action that appeal to your target customers. But how do you go about this? And wouldn’t it be great to see some real-world examples from B2B companies that are doing it successfully? Kellie de Leon, VP of marketing and strategy at B2B agency The Mx Group, works with marketers every day to help them create and execute customer-centric strategies and content that increase web engagement and conversion. In this webinar, she'll discuss how to make your website more customer-centric.
Empowering Product Teams: Measure the Immeasurable: Beyond Vanity MetricsHannah Flynn
As a product manager, it's your job to realize your product’s vision by executing your chosen strategy. It’s also your job to deliver value to the business. Ultimately, these two outcomes are aligned so the temptation is to focus primarily on business metrics. Doing this can cause you to lose focus on the real value you are trying to achieve, in favor of moving the vanity metrics such as launches and time spent.
Join Sari Harrison, Product Management Instructor at Product School, as she explains how to use immeasurable success criteria along with your more standard KPIs to deliver products that don't just get used a lot, but deliver real value.
Start With Why: Meet Your Goals with a Practical Product StrategyHannah Flynn
Whether you manage a feature, a product, or a whole suite of products, you likely have some goals that you're trying to meet. But do you have a strategy? Strategy and goals are different. It's your strategy that allows you to make decisions that help you meet your goals in the first place. For example, if you want grow your revenue, your strategy may be to enter a new market - and you may decide to make your product stand out in that market by adding analytics.
If you want to have an articulated strategy that you can use to make decisions, stay on-track, and meet your product goals, this is the webinar for you! Join Nils Davis, author of The Secret Product Manager Handbook, as he explains how you can get your team aligned to a practical product strategy.
How to Use Video Throughout the Buyer's JourneyHannah Flynn
Forrester Research Group reports that on average 70% of a buyer’s purchasing decision is made before engaging with a sales team. That’s staggering, but what does that mean for us as organizations?
For many of us, that means we must become great educators and provide the best answers for our prospects at every stage of their journey.
So the question is: Will you choose to be an educator in your industry?
Join us to find out where different video types perform best in the buyer’s journey and how you can use them to generate, qualify, and convert more leads.
Old Products, New Tricks: Embedding Operational Reports: Everything Product M...Hannah Flynn
Businesses are run with analytics—but companies continue to struggle with interpreting, analyzing, and distributing data. Operational reports help get information to the people who need it most, in formats they understand, and in a timeframe that matters.
Join the webinar to learn how embedding operational reports can give your users a precisely formatted, ready-to-analyze view of their operational activities. World-class software teams are embedding operational reports to empower end users with interactive data visualizations, detailed information, and highly precise formats that can be shared via email, PDF, print, or online.
Trends in B2B Marketing: Building your Demand Gen Team for ABMHannah Flynn
The benefits of using account-based marketing in your Demand Generation team are considerable: by getting as many engaged, qualified accounts as possible, your conversion rate will be higher and you'll find that Marketing and Sales are (gasp!) more aligned. Sounds great, doesn't it? But how do you even find the resources to make it happen?
Join Jessica Cross, Manager of Demand Generation at Rollworks, as explains how to build your Demand Generation team to best carry out ABM - even if your team is small. In fact, her own team has 3 people!
Empowering Product Teams: Build Delightful Products with Customer ValidationHannah Flynn
When it comes to delivering a solid product/market fit, customer validation is key. After all, you want to provide customers with a product that not only fills the need, but is delightful -- right? To get there, you need to commit to a vital blend of market research, strategy, and user testing.
Join John Little, Head of Product Marketing at Centercode, as he explains a two-part approach to customer validation. First, how do you strategically identify your top product areas that need attention prior to release. And second, how do you turn user data into strategic priorities that help the right teams make the right decisions.
Start With Why: Get Growth with Partner IntegrationsHannah Flynn
Once your SaaS product hits a certain level of revenue, you'll need to change things up to move past the plateau. One of the ways to do this is to move past your core product and introduce new business streams. If you're strategic about your integrations, you can strengthen your ties to your target market.
Join Mandy Howard, Product Manager at ServiceTitan, as she takes you through the three key questions that you need to answer to grow your product with the right partner integrations. Whether you're a start-up, or working on a new product in an enterprise environment, you'll learn how to push through to a new level of growth.
Empowering Product Teams: Leverage Your Organization for Best Product DecisionsHannah Flynn
You can learn a lot by studying your product data, but the real magic happens when product managers blend different types of data from different sources. If you want to blend data and intuition to make bold decisions that move your product forward, you'll need to open yourself up to new data sources - but where do you get this new information?
Rene Kolga, Senior Director of Product and Marketing at Nyotron, knows the answer: from other teams in your organization! Join us as Rene goes through the different teams you'll find in a B2B organization, how to build a strong relationship with those teams, and what kinds of insights you can get that will benefit your product.
Old Products, New Tricks: Potholes in your Roadmap and How to Fill ThemHannah Flynn
As a Product Manager, prioritizing work on your roadmap is an important part of your role. To answer roadmap questions, you're probably familiar with frameworks like RICE and Cost of Delay. But products are built by people, and people are messy - unlike these frameworks.
Hope Gurion, Product Coach and Advisor, has identified potholes in your roadmap that are preventing you from planning as best as you can. She'll take you through all the opportunities to improve your organization's relationship to its roadmap that you may have missed along the way.
Old Products, New Tricks: Add Value with a Dashboard Refresh: What You Need t...Hannah Flynn
Dashboards and analytics can really set your application apart, but that doesn't mean you can implement them and forget about them. Are they adding value to your product? Do your users benefit from them anymore? What should be improved, and what do we have the resources to improve?
Join Miles Robinson, former UX and Design Manager, as he explains the different ways to refresh your dashboards - and how to determine what's the best path to product dashboard success. You'll leave with an understanding of how to figure out the best next steps specifically for you and your application.
Product Managers of the Future: Art and Science in the Product LifecycleHannah Flynn
As a product manager, you have a lot of decisions to make - but how do you know when you know enough to make them? In an ideal world, you'd collect all the data you absolutely could - but nobody's got time for that! To make the best decisions for the future of your product - and make the most of your experimentation - you need to understand how to combine your data with intuition.
To make decisions, Lauren Chan Lee, Senior Director of Product Management at Care.com, has a three-step approach. Follow her steps, and you'll be masterfully embracing data and intuition and making faster, better decisions.
Supply Chain Network Design: Key Questions for a Successful Distribution NetworkHannah Flynn
As we plan for the world of eCommerce and the customer expectation of quick, free shipping, our ability to forecast is turned on its head. How many distribution centers do we even need, and is that number feasible? Can we use historical data to plan for demand and design our networks, or is there a better way?
If we're going to offer the speed of shipping and variety of inventory that today's customers have come to expect, there are a lot of different questions that need to be asked. Join Irina Rosca, Director of Supply Chain Operations at Helix and an experienced global supply chain strategist, as she walks through the key questions to a successful and efficient distribution network. You'll leave knowing what data you can start collecting today to answer these questions.
Trends in B2B Marketing: Why Marketers Must Shift Conversations from Replacin...Hannah Flynn
It's 2019. Business models have shifted. More and more companies are offering a subscription-based model or shortened contracts, which means marketers and product managers need to change how we think about our relationship to the customer. As marketers shift from mostly focusing on acquisition, it means working to align with product on retention and upsell - key drivers into today’s B2B business models.
Join Ardath Albee, CEO of Marketing Interactions, as she takes you through lessons learned going through this change at many different companies. She’ll show how the focus has moved from funnel to lifecycle, and the new battleground that is lifetime value and retention. However, that shift brings new challenges in having product and marketing working together to think through habits, stickiness, messaging, and more.
Dashboards That Set Your App Apart: Build Actionable Dashboards to Drive Your...Hannah Flynn
Most product dashboard review lagging indicators rather than leading indicator and focus on the wrong metrics to move the business forward. When your operations dashboard is well-aligned with your business's goals and access to data is decentralized, that empowers teams at all levels of the organization to make decisions that drive the business.
Join Jim O'Leary and Brian Elmi of NTENT as they share exactly what they've done to build successful dashboards. Using their methodology, you'll be able to plan out dashboards that are tailored to your business needs.
Dashboards that Set Your App Apart: The Complete Predictive Analytics Lifecyc...Hannah Flynn
Applications with predictive analytics are able to deliver massive value to end users. But what steps should product managers take to add predictive analytics to their applications?
In this webinar, we’ll walk through an end-to-end lifecycle of embedding predictive analytics inside an application. Find out how a real-world application decided what predictive questions to ask, sourced the right data, organized resources, built models, deployed predictive analytics in production, and monitored model performance over time.
Trends in B2B Marketing: Lead Gen and Engagement: Find your Marketing Sweet SpotHannah Flynn
A shift is occurring for B2B Marketers. We were measured by the number of leads we generate. So, we put gates up on our website, we stand in trade show booths and collect business cards, and run webinars or smaller events where we get people to sign up. Over time, we’ve become much better at measuring conversion rates and lead quality. Now that recent studies have shown that 49% of companies achieve a higher ROI by focusing on engagement over acquisition, there’s a shift from lead counts, lead quality to engagement.
But as a B2B Marketer, what does engagement mean? How can you get there? How do you measure it? How do you show value to the business? Where does lead gen and lead quality fit in? Dawn Colossi, CMO of FocusVision and a recognized leader in data-driven marketing strategy, has answers based on hard won experience.
Techniques to optimize the pagerank algorithm usually fall in two categories. One is to try reducing the work per iteration, and the other is to try reducing the number of iterations. These goals are often at odds with one another. Skipping computation on vertices which have already converged has the potential to save iteration time. Skipping in-identical vertices, with the same in-links, helps reduce duplicate computations and thus could help reduce iteration time. Road networks often have chains which can be short-circuited before pagerank computation to improve performance. Final ranks of chain nodes can be easily calculated. This could reduce both the iteration time, and the number of iterations. If a graph has no dangling nodes, pagerank of each strongly connected component can be computed in topological order. This could help reduce the iteration time, no. of iterations, and also enable multi-iteration concurrency in pagerank computation. The combination of all of the above methods is the STICD algorithm. [sticd] For dynamic graphs, unchanged components whose ranks are unaffected can be skipped altogether.
06-04-2024 - NYC Tech Week - Discussion on Vector Databases, Unstructured Data and AI
Round table discussion of vector databases, unstructured data, ai, big data, real-time, robots and Milvus.
A lively discussion with NJ Gen AI Meetup Lead, Prasad and Procure.FYI's Co-Found
The Building Blocks of QuestDB, a Time Series Databasejavier ramirez
Talk Delivered at Valencia Codes Meetup 2024-06.
Traditionally, databases have treated timestamps just as another data type. However, when performing real-time analytics, timestamps should be first class citizens and we need rich time semantics to get the most out of our data. We also need to deal with ever growing datasets while keeping performant, which is as fun as it sounds.
It is no wonder time-series databases are now more popular than ever before. Join me in this session to learn about the internal architecture and building blocks of QuestDB, an open source time-series database designed for speed. We will also review a history of some of the changes we have gone over the past two years to deal with late and unordered data, non-blocking writes, read-replicas, or faster batch ingestion.
Unleashing the Power of Data_ Choosing a Trusted Analytics Platform.pdfEnterprise Wired
In this guide, we'll explore the key considerations and features to look for when choosing a Trusted analytics platform that meets your organization's needs and delivers actionable intelligence you can trust.
Levelwise PageRank with Loop-Based Dead End Handling Strategy : SHORT REPORT ...Subhajit Sahu
Abstract — Levelwise PageRank is an alternative method of PageRank computation which decomposes the input graph into a directed acyclic block-graph of strongly connected components, and processes them in topological order, one level at a time. This enables calculation for ranks in a distributed fashion without per-iteration communication, unlike the standard method where all vertices are processed in each iteration. It however comes with a precondition of the absence of dead ends in the input graph. Here, the native non-distributed performance of Levelwise PageRank was compared against Monolithic PageRank on a CPU as well as a GPU. To ensure a fair comparison, Monolithic PageRank was also performed on a graph where vertices were split by components. Results indicate that Levelwise PageRank is about as fast as Monolithic PageRank on the CPU, but quite a bit slower on the GPU. Slowdown on the GPU is likely caused by a large submission of small workloads, and expected to be non-issue when the computation is performed on massive graphs.
Levelwise PageRank with Loop-Based Dead End Handling Strategy : SHORT REPORT ...
Create Success With Analytics: Living With Technical Debt - Balancing Quality and Perfection
1. Living With Technical Debt:
Balancing Quality and Perfection
With:
Cliff Gilley
Moderated by:
Hannah Flynn
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2. Delivering compelling applications with analytics at their core has never been more
crucial—or more complex. For over 17 years, Logi has helped companies embed
sophisticated dashboards and reports in their applications. Logi is the only developer
grade analytics platform on the market, and is rated the #1 embedded analytics platform
by Dresner Advisory Services.
Over 1,900 mission-critical applications have trusted Logi’s analytics development
platform to deliver sophisticated analytics and power their businesses. The company is
headquartered in McLean, Virginia, with offices in Dublin, Ireland and Reading, UK. Learn
more at LogiAnalytics.com.
3. 3
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4. About Cliff Gilley
For over 15 years, Cliff Gilley has been a product manager and Agile coach at a wide variety of companies across many
different industries, and is currently working as a Technical Product Manager for the K2 corporation in Bellevue,
Washington. He also blogs regularly as the Clever PM, teaches Product Management for General Assembly, and is an
active board member with the Pacific Northwest Product Management Community.
About Hannah Flynn
Hannah went to The University of Chicago, where she majored in Environmental Studies with a concentration in
Economics and Policy. She now works with Aggregage on social media strategy and webinar production on sites such as
Product Management Today, B2B Marketing Zone, and Customer Experience Update.
5. 5
What is Technical Debt?
LivingWith TechnicalDebt: Balancing Quality and Perfection
6. 6
Origin and Current Application
• Originally coined by Ward Cunningham, a
contributor to the Agile Manifesto.
• Intended to capture work that was done to
offset the unknown or unknowable at a point
in time.
• Now it describes tradeoffs we make during
development by leaning on the “fast” over
“good”.
LivingWith TechnicalDebt: Balancing Quality and Perfection
Ward Cunningham
7. 7
Why do we accumulate Technical Debt?
• The “right” way to solve a problem costs too much (time, effort,
resources, etc.)
• The available technology or skills don’t permit the most elegant
solution.
• There can be reasonable disagreement about the “best” way to
solve a problem.
LivingWith TechnicalDebt: Balancing Quality and Perfection
8. 8
Why do we accumulate Technical Debt?
• Product development and engineering are necessarily tied to business objectives.
• Technical complexity and time to deliver are in constant conflict.
• We choose to take on Technical Debt as a function of a “default” ship mentality (opposed
to “default delay”).
LivingWith TechnicalDebt: Balancing Quality and Perfection
9. 9
Being Real About Technical Debt
• Technical Debt is a reality that we deal with every day.
• If we’re not open about it, it’s happening in the shadows.
• Driving down Technical Debt is just as important as building new features.
LivingWith TechnicalDebt: Balancing Quality and Perfection
10. 10
Being Real About Technical Debt
• Technical Debt is a reality that we deal with every day.
• If we’re not open about it, it’s happening in the shadows.
• Driving down Technical Debt is just as important as building new features.
LivingWith TechnicalDebt: Balancing Quality and Perfection
The cost of never paying down…technical debt is clear;
eventually the cost to deliver functionality will become so
slow that it is easy for a well-designed competitive
software product to overtake the badly-designed software
in terms of features.
- Junade Ali, Mastering PHP Design Patterns
11. 11
Why Understanding Technical Debt
is Critical for Product Managers
LivingWith TechnicalDebt: Balancing Quality and Perfection
12. 12
Decisions We Make Impact Technical Debt
• Schedules, priorities, and design decisions all drive
accrual of Technical Debt.
• Too many Product teams don’t involve engineers early
enough in the process.
• When we aren’t thinking about or talking about the
delivery early and often, we don’t set our engineers up for
success.
LivingWith TechnicalDebt: Balancing Quality and Perfection
13. 13
Nobody Gets Away Without Some TD
• Almost no business can afford to let their
engineers take as long as they want to solve a
market problem.
• The very nature of software development requires
that we make trade-offs or less-than-optimal
choices.
• It’s not whether we take on Technical Debt, but
what we do with it that matters.
LivingWith TechnicalDebt: Balancing Quality and Perfection
14. 14
Sometimes Technical Debt is Useful!
• Focusing on “perfection” sacrifices delivery – and
sometimes we don’t even want the “best” solution.
• Understanding the options and tradeoffs lets us move
forward with our product.
• If we know we’re taking on Technical Debt, we can
implement the system in a way that encourages
refactoring
LivingWith TechnicalDebt: Balancing Quality and Perfection
15. 15
The Intersection of MVP and
Technical Debt
LivingWith TechnicalDebt: Balancing Quality and Perfection
16. 16
The “Real” Definition of MVP
• MVP is one of the most overused
terms in Product Management.
• Minimum + Viable + Product – if
it’s not all three then it’s not an
MVP.
• Most people sacrifice one of the
three, and suffer for the choice.
LivingWith TechnicalDebt: Balancing Quality and Perfection
MVP Final Product
17. 17
MVPs Are Limited, Creating Intentional TD
• Whenever we are working on an MVP, we will make
sacrifices.
• We might not focus on scalability, automation, or other
sources of technical debt.
• When we do this, it needs to be intentional and done in
a way that supports future refactoring.
LivingWith TechnicalDebt: Balancing Quality and Perfection
18. 18
Perfection is Enemy of Good, But MVP Means MVP
• The point of our MVP is to test a hypothesis – it should be
the best test that we can create.
• We’re not cutting corners on the product, we’re making
decisions based on our needs.
• At the end, it still must be minimal, viable, and a
product.
LivingWith TechnicalDebt: Balancing Quality and Perfection
19. 19
“Default Ship” v. “Default Delay”
• All our decisions lie on a spectrum – does this choice
delay shipping or accelerate it?
• Every company leans to one side or the other as a
default position.
• Accepting Technical Debt is a practice that leans us
toward “ship” over “delay”.
LivingWith TechnicalDebt: Balancing Quality and Perfection
21. 21
Knowing Really is Half the Battle
• Technical Debt happens whether we accept it or not.
• When TD is taken on in the shadows, it will show up
again when we least expect it.
• Knowing we’re taking on TD allows us to convince
stakeholders it needs to be paid back.
LivingWith TechnicalDebt: Balancing Quality and Perfection
22. 22
The Longer It Festers, the More Harmful it Becomes
Every piece of Technical Debt that we take on compounds with other
TD already in place.
The more time between taking on TD and resolving it, the more likely
we are to forget about it.
The more code we put into place, the more complex our remedial
refactoring will be.
We still need to be thoughtful about taking on TD, and when it’s not
worth it we reset stakeholder expectations.
LivingWith TechnicalDebt: Balancing Quality and Perfection
23. 23
Don’t Blindly Accept It – Mitigate It ASAP
• If we don’t fix it, we’ll pay for it in other ways.
• We have a responsibility as Product Managers to
ensure we’re fixing what we’ve chosen to “break”.
• Even if TD doesn’t immediately impact users, it will
cause issues further down the line.
LivingWith TechnicalDebt: Balancing Quality and Perfection
24. 24
Tips to Mitigate Technical Debt
• Trust, but verify – ensure that the Technical Debt actually
does need to be taken on.
• As soon as the TD is identified, add mitigation stories to
your team’s prioritized backlog, and keep them high.
• Educate stakeholders about TD – what it is, why it
happens, and what it means for them.
LivingWith TechnicalDebt: Balancing Quality and Perfection
26. 26
Technical Debt Shouldn’t Be a Four-Letter Word
• Technical Debt is an essential part of delivering product to
your market.
• Understanding when and why we take it on balances the
needs of engineering and the product/market.
• While building the best product we can, we still must balance
the reality that complex problems take time, effort, and
understanding.
• Sometimes the MVP is the best learning tool we have, and
sometimes getting the MVP out to the market requires
sacrifice via Technical Debt.
LivingWith TechnicalDebt: Balancing Quality and Perfection
The origins of technical debt date back to the 1990s, when Ward Cunningham (a contributor to the Agile Manifesto) was working with a finance company. Using terminology that he thought would resonate with his stakeholders, he coined the term “technical debt” to capture the idea that we “borrow” time by taking shortcuts, which must be paid back or accrue “interest” in complexity and risk. While he was originally referring primarily to working with technology that was itself limiting and limited, over time we have expanded the term to encompass all of the choices that we make to deliver short term value at the cost of long-term stability.
There are a lot of reasons why we accumulate technical debt in our software – from the blatantly reckless (“We don’t need a design, we’ll make it up as we go along.”) to the thoughtful and measured (“If we do this thing in this way, we can launch now and fix it in the next sprint.”). But between those two extremes is a spectrum, including several common possibilities – we may discover that the best way to solve the problem before us will simply cost too much in time, effort, or resources; we may discover that the technology simply isn’t quite stable enough; or we may find that there are simply too many options and differences of opinion about the “best” way to solve a problem.
There are a few truisms that are all too often sublimated or conveniently left out of our decision-making processes during software development. The first, and most important, is that the business usually drives software development, and not the other way around. That is to say, the development teams should always be attempting to achieve some business goal – and this in turn implies that there are business considerations that must be taken into account. Release dates that are based on specific market needs can and should constrain development work – meaning that some of the TD that we incur is due to meeting these constraints. Next, we know from decades of research and common sense that the technical complexity of solutions we’re building are always in conflict with time to deliver – its’ the classic Good / Fast / Cheap pyramid – “Good” comes at the cost of “Fast” or “Cheap”. Finally, there’s a cultural issue that sometimes leads to us determining when and how to take on TD – I’ll call this the “default ship” v. “default delay” mentality, something we’ll touch on later.
Even though we often don’t want to talk about it, Technical Debt is something that happens every single day during the development of our products. It’s something that can either happen behind the scenes, because people are afraid to talk about it, they’re punished for taking “shortcuts” that are needed to meet deadlines, or we’re even being willfully ignorant of the choices being made until they cause us pain – which they will at some point in the future. It’s also important for Product Managers to educate their stakeholders about the dangers of not taking steps to remedy Technical Debt. Whether you want to believe it or not, driving down the technical debt that you know about is as important as building new features.
Most people either don’t understand or don’t want to admit what Junade Ali observed in 2016 – ignoring TD opens you to serious business consequences. [read quote]
Intro to understanding TD
All too often, we shift the burden of caring about Technical Debt to our engineering teams – which is a seriously bad move. Sure, it insulates us from the problems in the moment, but removing us from the conversation means that we lose visibility into what those decisions are and what they mean for us. Further, as Product Managers, we’re often direct contributors to the things that cause engineering teams to incur technical debt in the first place. We’re the ones who manage launch schedules with our dev teams, we’re the ones who are in charge of priorities and prioritization, and we’re often the ones who are called on to make final design decisions – all of these things can cause our dev teams to take on technical debt. We also indirectly cause technical debt when we don’t involve our engineering teams early enough in the process, to tell or warn us ahead of times about things that might cause pain down the line. As Product Managers, we owe it to our engineering teams to make sure that we’re constantly thinking about the actual delivery process behind the plans that we make – so that we can set them up for success with minimal technical debt!
Engineering tasks are constrained by business requirements – there’s almost no business out there that can allow their engineers to take as long as they want to solve whatever problems they might have (contrary to what the #NoEstimates crowd might want us to believe). Rather, the very nature of software development and business delivery requires that we make technical tradeoffs and decide that short-term gains are more important than long-term stability. Because technical debt is an inevitability, we should be less concerned about whether we are taking it on (because we are) and more concerned about what we do with it after it’s already decided. We should also be aware of the ramification of taking on technical debt versus doing the “right” thing at the time – it could be that the best choice is to delay delivery to improve quality, but we can only make that decision if we raise the question.
It’s also important to understand that Technical Debt isn’t always a bad thing. There are very good reasons that engineering teams will take on Technical Debt in order to meet the business goals that we have set for them. First, we as Product Managers already know that we don’t always need to build the best, most feature-laden, fleshed-out feature – we should extend that acceptance to our engineering teams, and not let perfection be the enemy of good. We also want to make sure that we’re talking about TD so that we know the limitations of our product or platform as a whole – this information is critical as a Product Manager, because it can inform our own work in prioritization, design, and problem definition. Finally, if we’re upfront about the fact that we’re taking on TD, we can make sure that the implementation of the TD work is done in a way that invites refactoring – not in a way that requires a complete ground-up rework. Knowing that we’re intentionally taking on TD and adjusting for that choice is a responsibility that every Product Manager should take very seriously.
Intro to intersection of MVP & TD
“MVP” is one of the most overused and seemingly misunderstood concepts in all of Product Management, to the point where people have proposed other terms which actually mean pretty much the same thing as MVP. The problem is that most people forget that a true MVP is the minimum amount of work needed to deliver a viable set of features that are actually a product. If it’s missing any of these three attributes – if it’s more than the minimum needed, if it’s not actually viable, stable, and usable, or if it’s not actually a product that solves some set of valuable needs in the market, then it is not an MVP. Whether you prefer to call this “minimum lovable product”, “minimum usable product”, or “simple / lovable / complex”, we’re all talking about the same thing – something that reflects the least amount of work that is usable and stable enough for people to enjoy, and that solves a valuable market problem. Within those definitions, we can be flexible – if you want lovability, make that part of minimum or viable. The goal is to build the cupcake before you build the wedding cake – failing early saves us time, effort, and money. That is the point of an MVP.
“Minimum Lovable”, “Minimum Usable”, “Simple / Lovable / Complex” -- all are restating the “correct” definition of MVP
The intersection of MVP and Technical Debt should be pretty obvious – as a simple matter of focusing on the minimum part of our MVP, we’re likely going to make sacrifices on the technical approach. We might choose not to focus on scalability, automation, complexity, edge cases, or any number of possible sources of technical debt. The point that we need to take home today is that we need these choices to be intentional and not accidental, and when we know that we’re taking on this TD, we want to make sure that it’s implemented in a way that supports future refactoring. The sooner we can come back and improve what we’ve taken technical debt against, the better off we will be.
The reason we focus on building an MVP is to test a hypothesis – it could be a market hypothesis, it could be a problem hypothesis, or it could be a solution hypothesis. But we’re building the MVP for a specific reason, and we always want our MVP to be the best test of our hypothesis that we can make – we shouldn’t be cutting corners to make the product that we want to release, we should be making decisions based on the needs that we have and the data that we’ve collected from the market. We want to be “ruthlessly devoted” to ensuring that we’re delivering our MVP while making sure it’s the best MVP that we can make. Is that a contradiction? Perhaps, but as Product Managers we’re used to dealing with contradictions and still managing to deliver on our promises.
There’s a concept I came across while doing research for my blog a couple years ago that really struck me, and I’ve been evangelizing it ever since. This is the concept of “default ship” versus “default delay” cultures. While there’s a spectrum between the two, it seems that a lot of different companies wind up landing on one side or the other, usually for historical and cultural reasons. A “default delay” company tends to come from the bad, old world of actually shipping physical media – where you simply couldn’t afford to ship with bugs, because fixing them was such a pain. Similarly, many large B2B platforms take a “default delay” approach because of the costs associated with disrupting the processes of their large enterprise customers. In the consumer space, “default ship” is far more common – Facebook is infamous for it’s “move fast and break things” motto, and there’s rarely a AAA video game title that doesn’t ship without a day-one patch, among other continuous fixes over time. It’s important to know where your company lies on this spectrum, as it can directly affect how we choose to deal with TD. Companies that are more accepting of TD tend to be further along the spectrum of “default ship” than those who want to take on as little debt as possible, who wind up on the other side, as “default delay” cultures. The more we can convince our stakeholders and our company that TD is not necessarily a bad thing, and can be an accelerator, the more we can shift our culture to be more “default ship” oriented, which is where most companies should be in this modern era of software development.
Managing technical debt
Fortunately, managing technical debt actually isn’t really as hard as it might seem – and while you might never be able to handle or manage all of the technical debt that your teams are taking on, you can start with present and future choices and work your way back as time allows. The single most important factor in managing TD is simply knowing about it – being honest with your teams about the fact that TD happens, that it’s a necessary evil, and that it’s okay to not just talk about it, but to discuss it with others both inside and outside the engineering organization. The worst thing that we can do is ignore it – because unknown technical debt always shows up when we least expect it, and then everyone is scrambling to firefight the issues when they could have been mitigated sooner, if we’d only been honest about it. And, as Product Managers, when we know that we’re taking on TD, we can use that opportunity to educate our stakeholders about it, and to help them understand when, how, and why we’re going to pay that debt back. If we take the time to educate our stakeholders, we just might find that they’re more willing to negotiate on priorities than we think that they might be, particularly if we can position paying back TD as a net benefit to both the company and the customer.
Ignoring technical debt is a tempting thing to do for any Product Manager – even if it sounds like we’re intruding on the “how”?. But when we ignore it, we wind up setting ourselves up for failure in the future. You simply must be aware of the technical debt your teams are taking on for the following four reasons… [read slide]
1 – TD compounds over time, just like interest – a decision here, then there, then over on the other project, all combine to create a mishmash of interactions that we will someday have to unwind. Sooner is better, later is never.
2 – Let’s be honest, we’ve all got huge backlogs of work, and it’s very easy to lose track of one or two stories that deal with mitigating TD. The longer we let something sit on the backlog, the more likely it is to never get done, and this seems particularly true for TD work items, as they’re not usually viewed as providing “customer benefit.”
3 – The longer we wait, the more code will be added around the TD that we incurred, and as a result, unwinding that choice that we made to skip some concern becomes much harder to resolve. When we take shortcuts in complex solutions, we’re just increasing the complexity for the future.
4 – None of this should be taken to mean that we should just blindly take on TD to accelerate our delivery, every time. Rather, we need to work with our engineering teams to understand exactly why they think we need to take on any kind of TD, what the options are if we choose not to take on the TD, and what the benefit is to the system or the customers in doing so. Taking on TD needs to be a conversation and not just a decision.
Pay for it in other ways:
New hire training and onboarding in development
Slower time to market for future features that interact with TD
Difficulty of testing may result in uncertainty in future work
Issues down the line:
ETL @ Mercent
Complex systems introduce unknowable risks – TD compounds this
It always hits us at the worst possible time.
It’s our job as Product Managers to understand the “whole product” – which includes the choices being made by our development teams. We need to be proactively involved in discussions about technical debt, so that we can do a better job of prioritizing our problem statements, and managing stakeholder expectations, the two most important things that we wind up doing every single day. Here are three tips to mitigating technical debt that you can literally start doing tomorrow. [Read slide]
Trust but verify – it’s really easy to just take the engineering team’s word for it, and to just accept that they know what they’re talking about. But sometimes there are alternatives to taking on the technical debt, sometimes there are things that the team just doesn’t want to do, even though they can do it. We should trust their opinions, but engage with them to be sure that we’ve exhausted other viable options.
Mitigation – All too often, we take on technical debt and tell ourselves that we’ll add the stories to mitigate it later. And then we forget. And then two years later, the TD comes back to bite us. It’s essential that whenever you decide to take on technical debt, you immediately add remedial stories to the backlog so that they can be prioritized and addressed sooner rather than later.
Education – Stakeholders don’t care about TD because (1) they don’t know about, or (2) they don’t understand it. Part of our jobs as Product Managers includes taking the time needed to help our Stakeholders understand the consequences of prioritization and schedule choices, and ensure that they recognize that taking on technical debt is a short-term gain with long-term effects.
Intro to wrapping it up
If you take nothing else away from this webinar, it’s the understanding that technical debt is not a four-letter word (neither literally nor metaphorically). It’s an essential component of use delivering valuable products to the market – if we never incur technical debt, it’s entirely possible that we never ship a product. We need to be proactive as Product Managers in working with our engineering teams to understand when and why we want to take it on, and balance those desires against the business reality that we’re trying to work in. And we should leverage technical debt as another learning tool – understanding the nature of the technical debt that needs to be taken on can keep us better informed about how the things that we want can (or can’t) be easily done – which in turn feeds back into prioritization and stakeholder management.
Thank you for your time today, I hope you’ve enjoyed this little discussion about the ins and outs of Technical Debt – let’s turn the podium over to you, the audience. Does anyone have any questions?