The previous article on Improving Product Performance must have hit home, because I received more responses to it than any other issue. This reinforces my belief that product performance is an area where there is very little guidance out there. Not only do developers struggle with performance and scalability, often flying blind, but it spills over ...

One aspect of a software product which every company that develops software struggles with, all with very little outside guidance and standards for support, is product performance. A user's impression of how fast your product moves from screen to screen, how quickly it calls up lists of records, how seamlessly it performs tasks when you ...

Note: I am pleased to announced that I am a nominee for the 2006 Excellence in Product Management award for Thought Leadership given by the AIPMM. I will be at the AIPMM conference this April 19-21 (see www.aipmm.com) and hope to see some of you there. When Product Managers push to accomplish their goals for a ...

Note: I am pleased to announced that I am a nominee for the 2006 Excellence in Product Management award for Thought Leadership given by the AIPMM. I will be at the AIPMM conference this April 19-21 (see www.aipmm.com) and hope to see some of you there. Every culture has its blind spots and weak points that ...

One challenge facing a Product Manager is how to balance limited Development resources between the need for maintenance work on the one hand and for new capabilities on the other. Devoting too many resources to one or the other can cause your product to be out of whack and lose ground to competitors who do ...

Many companies today want to package their software product as an Application Service Provider (ASP), or hosted, offering. Hosting your software brings a number of advantages to your business. But hosting software is not for the faint of heart. Read on to understand the dynamics, the limitations, and the considerations involved in successfully hosting software. Continue Reading...

Software development organizations struggle mightily with planning their development efforts and sticking to the plan. Some Development departments fail to plan at all, other than following constantly changing, seat-of-the-pants estimates, much to the chagrin of the rest of the company that depends upon their output. Others have solid plans that they can follow and use ...

Companies, in the drive to produce new capabilities in their software product and roll them out to the market, run into conflicting priorities. One priority is to keep Development producing new features, where the key is meeting announced dates and moving on to work on the next version. The other priority is for Production to ...

Product Managers find themselves at the center of their company's debates and decisions on product design. They understand how crucial it is for the software to be well designed, so that it not only does what the market wants it to do, but does it in the way the market wants it to. Good product design ...

If you have worked in or with the software industry at all, you have lived through some dramatic delays in product development. For instance, Product Guernsey, originally announced last year, was due in January. It's now the beginning of June, and it's announced that the product, now called Providence, won't be out until September. Or ...