Kaizen (改善), is the Japanese word for “continuous improvement “. In
business, kaizen refers to activities that continuously improve all functions
and involve all employees from the CEO to the assembly line workers.

During the many DevOps adoption journeys we have seen among VersionOne customers, we have started to identify trends between companies that experience high impact after adoption and companies that take longer to realize significant benefits from their DevOps journey. The main differences we have seen among high performers are:

• They are very good at communicating company-wide and making their work visible
• They quickly identify areas of opportunity in the value stream and make small changes consistently

This may seem overly simple; and it is. It turns out the biggest challenges at large organizations who are adopting DevOps are A) they don’t know how to make the work...

Let’s start with a confession: I used to hate the term “DevOps”. It was fuzzy, unclear, and worse of all, it meant different things to different people. Over the past couple of years however, the term has solidified and has become the global meaning of modern practices for integration and delivery. The effectiveness with which we complete the software development lifecycle loop – that is, how long it takes to deliver “development done” code to customers and get feedback – is effectively how we measure DevOps performance. This performance is becoming more and more a measure of business agility and the companies that respond to customers’ needs the fastest win.

The time and effort that it takes for software organizations to design and implement modern DevOps practices AND deliver “done” software to customers is often lost on the eyes of parties outside the development organization and...

It’s hard to believe agile has now been around for more than 15 years. With its introduction, teams started seeing increased output and thus a higher number of releases. With the increased number of releases came the need and implementation of Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery (CD), and eventually what we’re calling DevOps.

While DevOps has increased the speed with which organizations deliver software (both through culture change and new tools) there continues to be a disconnect between development and delivery. The reason for this is often times software teams work on story ABC, however, delivery teams deliver build 1.2.3. Different teams solve this problems in different ways, often tracking stories manually as they are delivered as part of a build or building complex CI dashboards which require tons of attention and maintenance. Both of these methods have the same...

I think it’s natural for Product Managers to have an entrepreneurial spirit and I’m no different. I’m always looking for information and feedback on founder’s experiences and startups.

Today I came across a great example from Smore’s founder and CEO Gilad Avidan, check it out below.

We need more of this unfiltered, honest feedback from tech founders; it’s inspiring and motivating.

One of the most important things Product Managers and development teams must do before developing a solution is to properly establish and validate premises and not make assumptions about anything.

Today it’s easier to experiment as a lot of times it’s cheaper to build it than to research it and thanks to A/B testing you can experiment without affecting your users.

Etsy’s product team – more specifically this guy) – does a great job at this and this presentation does a great job at showing product teams how to properly do this.

So back in January, Sheryl Sandberg called Netflix’s presentation on Culture “[…] the most important document ever to come out of the Valley“. Ever since then I’ve quoted examples from this presentation multiple times when communicating what makes company culture great.

It turns out a lot of people I talk to about this have never seen this presentation; I think everyone in the tech industry (especially leaders) should see this. It truly exemplifies how culture in a startup or tech company cascades downstream and how crucial it is to take time to hire the right people (as well as only keeping the best people).

See presentation below.

I recently came across the former state of well known products and thought to share.

This really shows you that the initial product you launch doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to work (at least minimally).

A couple of months ago I wrote an entry on how I got to be a Product Manager (read it here). Recently, I came across a great presentation from Google PM Shreyas Doshi. While this was part of a SVPMA talk (which I imagine was nothing short of wonderful), the slides alone provide great, funny, and dead-on information on what to expect when looking for that next PM job.

Often times we forget about the process of getting jobs, how important it is to stand out and how crucial it is to have realistic expectations.

You can view the presentation in the SVPMA archive here. This is an extended version which I recommend.

You can also see it from SlideShare below.

It has been a while since I’ve done mock-ups for a new product; most products I’m currently working on are existing products for which I have a set of existing mock-ups that are simply updated with new features, etc.

Recently, I was tasked with creating a new product and thus had to create brand new sets of mock-ups; or for the fancier PM, low-fidelity prototypes.

I’d been wanting to try Balsamiq for a long while since my old boss recommended it and I have to say, I don’t know why I hadn’t tried it earlier.

Here’s a short video that in short shows the great capabilities of Balsamiq: