Independent Software Consultant
Independent Software Consultant
How do you manage the way you build, manage and market your software product? Articles explore the relationship between strategy and delivery through the lens of product management.
A SaaS provides a service to a user via the internet, and people pay money to use it. A SaaS, however, is not seen as a service to the software company that builds it. It’s known internally as a product – or many products. And ironically, that product might itself be built out of microservices. …
When a software product first comes out, we often don’t have a delivery pipeline; we often don’t have a backlog full of juicy features to develop. Sometimes we don’t even have a clue where it’s going. We have an idea of what a customer wants, and we build it. When the software is in use, …
When was the last time you did a Minimal Viable Product that was actually minimal? How often do we get it right and truly focus on delivering something of value to the customer? On this week’s podcast, I riff on the idea of how to get a true MVP, not only past the idea stage, …
When you’re building a software product it’s easy to get caught up in the mechanics of making something work and making something successful. So what about the opportunities that we see around us? On the weekend I finally tied out a AI bot for generating art. You’ve probably found it hard to miss the exploits …
You may have heard about B2B (Business to Business) and B2C (Business to Consumer) marketing. But what does this mean for your software product? And can you be both? And is being both a good idea for our marketing mix or is it a good idea for our customer? The appealing thing about B2B selling …
In Friday’s email I sent a list of things that can slow down your software delivery. While there are many technical reasons why this can be the case (tightly coupled architecture, lack of modularity or microservices, technical debt, breakage in production) there are also many process-driven reasons. Right up there, for process-related delivery slowness, is …
Does technology choice define a software product? Programmers: how often do you use the next project as an excuse to try out a new technology? Product managers: how often do you curse the technology for not giving you opportunity to do something you want to do? The creative side of programming means that inevitably we …
When you use the tools around you to collect your thoughts, do you think you’re doing valuable work? When you automate a piece of your software build, write a test or create a deployment script, do you think you’re saving yourself from a future of manual labour? When you have a session with a stakeholder …
You might have heard the expression before, it comes from the Hans Christian Andersen fable, and it means: To ignore the fact that something is plainly wrong because we don’t give ourselves enough credit. What should you do when you think something isn’t working? What should you do when you see something is going to …
Get ready for an obvious statement: things have changed a lot over the last 30 years of IT. How did IT used to be organised? How it is now? Long ago, when a company wanted a new system is that they would look around, or more likely use a consultancy to help them decide. A …