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How to create products customers love

published December 3, 2009

Yesterday I finished reading book by Marty Cagan “How to create products customers love” and I recommend it for team leaders and for everyone working in product owner or project manager roles. Book is about product management and Mr. Cagan is stating that custom software (consulting) is running by somewhat different rules. Still, there are much to learn from the product business that directly applies to consulting.

I discovered product management through Poppendiecks’ book “Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash“. Their message is that custom software world should learn from how great software products are built. I totally agree.  In the product world, customers’ problems and product vision must be very well understood and communicated by a product manager. In my experience, the custom software world is doing these two things often poorly.  A Lot of custom development in corporate settings is done for internal applications and I think that the concept of customer is somewhat vague.  In my opinion, the ultimate customers for the internal applications are end users and I do not see them very often involved in the building of those applications.  Good product managers are hard to find and in corporate settings customer project manager is often working as product manager and “proxy end user”. In reality these are all different roles and they require different skill set. If you throw in the fact that customers in general do not know exactly what they want, you find yourself in “regular” consulting project.

Agile methods attack this issue by delivering value incrementally so that results are seen after every sprint and correct solution is built. However, I feel this very thing is working as a excuse for not having a clear vision for a solution, which is absolutely a must in product world. This is something that a good product managers understands. In the end, successful consulting projects need competent people from both customer and integrator.

Samuli @ 19:17 (No Comments)

tags: Lean, Quality

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