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Author: Jeremy Jarrell

Jeremy Jarrell
Productivity

What Chess Can Teach You About Product Management

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Chess — the game of kings. For most, chess is a lifelong journey, a skill crafted over years of study. But, unlike most chess enthusiasts, I didn’t discover chess until well into adulthood…and several years after I jumped into the field of Product Management. However, this late discovery afforded me the chance to recognize the parallels between this ancient game and the emergent field of technology Product Management. Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell
Productivity

INVEST Questions Are More Than Just Yes Or No

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It’s no secret that agile teams thrive on collaboration. So much so, that this phrase has been echoed as a warning against over-detailing stories for decades. But, even the most agile-leaning teams tend to benefit from some refinement to their stories to create clarity on what the team is trying to achieve with those stories. Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell
Productivity

Focusing On Predictability Over Velocity

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One of the challenges that organizations who are new to agile often face is a perceived loss of insight into their teams’ progress. After all, if an agile approach asks teams to forego the creation of a detailed upfront plan then how will that organization know if their teams are on track? Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell
Productivity

Measuring the Business Value of your Stories

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Many agile teams have become obsessed with speed. How fast can we release? How fast can we close stories? How fast can we deliver to market? What too few fail to realize, however, is that none of this speed matters unless what the team is delivering is actually providing value to their organization. Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell
Productivity

Spotting the Dark Matter Tasks on Your Team

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Ever get the feeling that your team is working on more than what’s actually in the backlog? Even with the best laid plans, there are still many tasks that can lie between the cracks, distracting your team from the work at hand. Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell
Productivity

Setting a Goal for Your Iteration

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Too often, the set of stories that teams select for their iteration has no overarching theme or focus. In fact, while these stories may be individually valuable, at times their selection can appear almost random. Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell
Productivity

How to Use Blocking and Tackling for a Great Iteration Planning Meeting Every Time

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Backlog refinement is a practice intended to help you keep the top of your backlog in a refined state so you can have better iteration planning sessions. But despite the value backlog refinement can yield, there is no officially prescribed approach for how to do it. However, if you’re looking for a simple way to introduce this practice to your team, then don’t despair: there’s an easy approach that you can use with your team today. Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell
Productivity

How to INVEST in Your User Stories

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If you’re a product manager, user stories are a critical part of how you interact with your team. Nothing trumps a face-to-face conversation, but the key to starting that conversation is a good story. Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell
Productivity

Keeping Your Team on Track

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One of the most striking things that nearly all highly effective teams have in common is a small—but reasonable—set of clearly defined goals for each iteration. Rather than obsessing over secondary metrics, such as the number of stories closed or the total number of points completed, successful teams measure their success by their ability to deliver on the goals they set for themselves at the beginning of the iteration. Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell
Productivity

Embracing Evil with Evil User Stories

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If you’re like most product managers, you probably have a backlog full of user stories representing just what you’d like to see your best users do with your product. But what about your not so great users? Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell
Productivity

Velocity Is Not the Goal

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How is my team doing? How much have they done? Inevitably, after your team starts to make progress using an agile methodology, you’ll find yourself wanting to measure that progress. And as soon as you start to look at how to measure agile teams, you’ll encounter velocity. Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell
Productivity

Choosing the Right Iteration Length

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One of the most common questions facing teams that are new to agile is, “What’s the right iteration length for our team?” Although this question can seem daunting at first, there’s actually a simple way to find the answer. Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell
Productivity

Splitting Stories Across Teams

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If you are releasing a feature across both platforms, you may originally start with that feature described as a single user story but then split the story in two as each team tackles their respective implementations. Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell
Productivity

Finding the Right Amount of Backlog Refinement

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Many product managers struggle with getting the right level of detail in their backlog. If the backlog is too vaguely defined, then your team picks up stories that aren’t immediately actionable, which can slow them down. On the other hand, if the backlog is too well defined, then it becomes rigid and fails to evolve as your product takes shape. Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell
Productivity

Choosing the Best Slice of Your Story

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Learning to split large user stories into smaller user stories is one of the best things a team can do to improve their workflow. Not only are smaller stories easier to understand—and therefore easier to estimate—but their smaller size makes them inherently less risky for a team to take on. Read more...

Jeremy Jarrell
Productivity

Three Ways Product Managers Can Help with a Great Iteration Planning Meeting

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A great iteration planning meeting (IPM) sets the tone for the entire iteration. Your team leaves the session energized, excited, and with a clear picture of how to hit the ground running in the new iteration. But, what if things don’t go as well as you’d hoped? Then your team will leave the session tired and frustrated. They will leave without a clear idea of how to get started on their new set of work. They may even leave without any idea of what their goal for the next iteration even is. Read more...