(2018-07-28) Cagan Tools And Processes

Martin Cagan: Tools and Processes. The key is to realize that every tool, method or process is trying to help the intended user to do certain things more easily, and they usually also intentionally make it difficult to other things

As an example, an area of active tool development right now is the OKR space.

most of the tools actually make it hard to not be transparent. To me this is a good thing. But to others, especially those that hold different views on leadership and empowerment, this might not be what they want.

Another example would be product roadmap tools

I have seen several tools that are designed to make it easy to tally the requests from different stakeholders and from different customers or prospective customers, so that the product manager can make a “data-driven” decision on what the priority of the requested features should be.

If that’s how you want to determine what your team will work on, then these types of roadmap tools are helping you towards that end. However, if you believe as I do that this is exactly the wrong approach to coming up with winning products, then a team forced to use a tool like this will have to fight the tool in order to try to do good work