#productmanagement

Unleash the full potential of your business. Our expertise in product development drives your vision to success.

I have a passion for product, project management, and instructional design. There is nothing more thrilling than seeing something to completion within the timeframe, budget, and specifications you helped set forth. However, that was not always the case. Let's talk about my past, present, and future.

Past

I received an Associate of Arts (A.A.) from Mid-Michigan College in 2006, studying Secondary Education. However, teaching wasn't my destined path. In 2010, I became an accidental instructional designer (ID). By chance, I came across a posting that opened my world to the joys of teaching adults. I dove in headfirst, learning anything and everything I could, writing, and sharing my experience along the way. I decided to go on an adventure in 2014 and continued my path in South Dakota. After five years of experience and sharing, I was contacted by a software company to provide my recommendations for building up a customer community base online. I shared the vision and passion with upper management, so in 2015, I became a Community Manager for the company. Although all of this may seem disconnected, my path has made me a well rounded and knowledgeable project/product manager.

Present

I currently work as the Vice President of Product Manager for a training solutions provider. I have been with the company for three years and love to continue to grow my knowledge and passion. In 2020, I decided to return to Central Michigan University to finish my Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Business Administration. While studying my major, General Business, I'm working on a concentration in Applied Business Communication. Central Michigan University was my first choice since it's a local college noted for its business degrees from which my father and sister are alumni (1986 and 2017, respectively).

Future

In the future, I plan on continuing my work in the adult education field. I've come to enjoy product management and hope to continue managing training implementation. I've seen the most success in technical training; however, I've also served the manufacturing, medical, and hospitality industries. After college is complete, I plan on continuing my education by completing a Project Management Professional (PMP) certification from the Project Management Institute.

Blog Goals

By maintaining this blog I hope to share my process of social media evaluation and other marketing tactics with students, professors, and marketing industry leaders.

I feel like Hot Topic is a great example of the fundamental cycle of collaboration. Hot Topic knows the purpose of the store is to bring together people who like similar products together with product makers (purpose). They provide the opportunity for style influencers to participate in campaigns (contribution). They’ve allowed changed and transparency by running contests which provide products that community members have created or agreed upon. My personal favorite was the Rick and Morty T-shirt design from 2017.

Our working style also incorporates agile sprint planning.

The first two weeks

We spent the first two weeks with our partners getting oriented, and doing free-form discovery; talking with folks, reading documents, reviewing previous research, trying to understand the problem space and organizational context, and getting situated.

We didn’t plan formal sprints; instead we created one Trello board for each week and added tasks as they emerged.

Halfway through this time, I learned about Sprint 0 from Cohort 2 #CodeForCanada PM fellow Siobhan.

Have you had any luck with Sprint 0? Is it useful?

Instead of Sprint 0, we used Sprint 1 to learn how to sprint as a team. We filled and prioritized the backlog, planned the sprint, updated and provided visibility throughout, and reviewed the sprint and did a retrospective together, continuously checking in with one another.

Although we did include substantial tasks, we were kind to ourselves if things were left incomplete.

Sprint planning schedule

Since then, we’ve been on a bi-weekly sprint schedule. The sprint schedule goes as follows:

[Ongoing] Gather activities for the backlog

[Sprint Day 1 - Monday] Sprint planning meeting

[Daily] Standup at 9:45am

[Sprint Day 10 - Friday] Sprint retro

How do you organize your sprint planning meeting, daily standup, and sprint retro meeting? When do you schedule them? What format works best for your team?

Sprint planning tools

We use Trello to build the backlog and tee-up the sprint tasks. This has a simple and straightforward Kanban format – backlog, todo, doing, done.

We tried a couple other Kanban mediums – colourful sticky notes & sharpies and writing on a whiteboard.

Although these are great for in-office visibility, ultimately Trello is our source-of-truth because it enables remote work and is accessible on mobile.

What tools or software do you use for sprint planning and tracking?

Maintaining and prioritizing the backlog

Since we’re still in discovery, our backlog tasks have been exploratory and high-level. For example, “map the policy landscape” or “build a framework to prioritize problems”.

I often refer to these as “choose-your-own-adventure” activities. In almost all cases, the person who proposed the activity was accountable for ensuring it got done. They had the best idea of how to approach the activity – whether it was individual research, a sticky-note workshop with the team, or setting up stakeholder interviews. But the approach became more visible as new information was uncovered.

Because these were mostly led by individuals, there hasn’t been much backlog maintenance or prioritization thus far.

At the beginning of a project, how do you balance your team’s excitement for individual initiatives and investigation, and prioritizing a backlog?

Looking forward

Change is inevitable. As our project progresses, we’ll reassess what works and what doesn’t, and adapt from there.

As we move into experimentation, our activities will become more concrete in scope and tasks. Our tasks will likely have to be estimated and the backlog groomed; priorities clearly communicated to ensure the team is aligned and moving in the same direction.