A Crash Course for Non-Technical Stakeholders who need to Manage Product and App Development

Project Rhythm

How do you set priority, check progress, and stay focused on the right thing on the monthly and quarterly level? The Concepts of Pivotal Tracker video outlines that process in the context of Pivotal Labs’ style of Extreme Programming flavor of agile. A Responsible Recipe for the Fewest Possible Meetings goes on to specify a starting point for healthy team communications structure—enough so everyone knows what’s going on (or knows enough to probe more deeply), but not so much that unnecessary time is burned in expensive meetings.

Building Product

To ensure you’re building the right thing (and continuing to ask “what’s the right thing?”), start at a high level by learning how to Use Lean Hypotheses to Define a Minimum Viable Product. The exercise which we usually use to outline this is detailed in Inception: Knowing what to build and where you should start. On a more granular level, perhaps the most high-leverage skill is learning How to write Well-Formed User Stories. As a project continues and you need to continually capture ideas it can be helpful to Set your sights on the next Milestone with an Idea Board. For those times when you need to do long-term planning (despite the fact that your backlog ought to be short-term and granular), check out
Long-term Estimation in an Agile Environment, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Assumptions Label.

Links

<br />[A Responsible Recipe for the Fewest Possible Meetings]: https://content.pivotal.io/blog/a-responsible-recipe-for-the-fewest-possible-meetings
[Concepts of Pivotal Tracker]: http://bit.ly/conceptsofpivotaltracker
[How to write Well-Formed User Stories]: https://content.pivotal.io/blog/how-to-write-well-formed-user-stories
[Inception: Knowing what to build and where you should start]: https://content.pivotal.io/blog/inception-knowing-what-to-build-and-where-you-should-start
[Long-term Estimation in an Agile Environment, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Assumptions Label]:https://content.pivotal.io/blog/long-term-estimation-in-an-agile-environment-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-assumptions-label
[Set your sights on the next Milestone with an Idea Board]: https://content.pivotal.io/blog/set-your-sights-on-the-next-milestone-with-an-idea-board
[Use Lean Hypotheses to Define a Minimum Viable Product]: https://content.pivotal.io/blog/use-lean-hypotheses-to-define-a-minimum-viable-product

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