Product Articles
Agile and The Indianapolis 500
The Indianapolis 500 has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. And after years of building software at SEP — an Indiana company through and through — the similarities are striking. The pre-race strategy sessions. Testing assumptions during practice sessions. Real-time adjustments during pit stops. The moment when weather […]
How Product Discovery Maximizes Your Chances of Success
Savvy companies use product discovery to bring focus to new projects and during projects to shape upcoming releases. This helps design software for the three needs of effective products: Functionality: The software has the requested features, is well built, and maintainable. Business: The software is designed to accomplish specific business objectives. User: The software has […]
In Product Strategy, Ideas Are Important, but Execution is Critical
Ideas are important, but executing them is even more so! I had the opportunity to present at our recent SEPTalks event about how companies can close the gap between idea and delivery. We touched on the North Star Framework, what barriers get in the way of trying to achieve these goals, and a mental model […]
Industry: The Product Conference
Before I jump into my experience with Industry: The Product Conference this year, let me set the stage— On Father’s Day a few years ago, I didn’t have anything planned. I figured I would ‘wing’ the day and not feel constrained to some schedule (these are rare moments in my life). So my wife suggested […]
Focus Your Product Perspective
Have you ever tried to work with someone with the best of intentions, but it ends in a shouting match? Or walking away with the same or more problems than you started? A colleague was dealing with helping their client with upcoming milestones, and it felt like a similar situation was inevitable. He wanted to […]
Planning Features with Opportunity Solution Trees
New software projects often come with a long list of potential features. How do you evaluate these ideas before investing costly resources into development? At SEP, we’ve been mapping potential features with opportunity solution trees. They are a way to visualize the relationships between ideas and their desired outcomes, and to manage the gaps in […]
10 Things I Learned in My First 10 Episodes of Podcasting
I’ve had the opportunity to interview talented, driven and successful leaders in Indy tech. We often don’t get to hear how software products get built and what it took to make them a reality. These stories of success and challenge have been encouraging for me to hear so I summarized some of my biggest lessons […]
A Pandemic Isn’t a Reason to Stop Researching (but… It Might Be a Good Reason to Start)
When it comes to doing user research, I’m always going to recommend learning with someone in their own space. Seeing someone use your product in their environment will always add more context to your investigation. Generally, research falls into these categories: exploratory/generative research (looking to understand problems, needs, goals, etc.) evaluative research (benchmarking your understanding, […]
3 Tools to Develop Your Agile Product Strategy
I recently had the opportunity to attend a webinar on agile product strategy given by our Director of Innovation, Chris Shinkle. Here are three tools I took away from the presentation that you can use to develop an agile product strategy that works. The Problem Do any of these situations sound familiar? Your product strategy […]
The Anatomy of Event Storming
Here at SEP, we are continually toying with practices to help us learn from our clients. Learn about their worlds. Learn about their problems. And in this case, learning about their domains. Event storming is a “cross-discipline conversation between stakeholders with different backgrounds” (from https://www.eventstorming.com/). Said another way…event storming is an activity that we use as […]
Software Producer: What’s in a name?
SEP had an interesting time establishing the title of Software Producer. We wanted it to mean something, like “Software Engineering Professionals” is not just our name; it’s who we are. Not a Product Manager When looking into the activities that our Software Producer perform, there is a lot of overlap with a Product Manager. That title is […]
Meet the Software Producer
It isn’t every day that a new title is introduced around here. And I get to have the fun of helping define it, because I’m one of the few on the block with that new title: Software Producer. Why do we need a new title? SEP grew out of an engineering focus from its inception. Do the […]