­Written by successful product manager Marc Abraham, My Product Management Toolkit is a comprehensive guide to developing a physical or digital product that consumers love. Here’s a sample of what you’ll find within these pages: Strategies for determining what customers want—even when they don’t know themselves Clear suggestions for developing both physical and digital products Effective methods to constantly iterate a product or feature Containing wisdom from Abraham’s popular blog, this book explores product management from every angle, including consumer analysis, personnel management, and product evolution. Whether you’re developing a product for a small start-up or a multinational corporation, this book will prove invaluable.

    An easy-to-follow six-step process developed over the past 15 years can help you address unsolved problems, recognize buyer personas, quantify impact and create breakthrough experiences. Stop wasting time by guessing what your market needs and start understanding consumer desire.

    The findings will surprise many readers and, quite frankly, upset others.The ChallengeBuilt to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the very beginning. But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness? The StudyFor years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great?The StandardsUsing tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck. The ComparisonsThe research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good? The FindingsThe findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include:Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness.The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence.A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology.The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap.

    In Anything You Want, Sivers details his journey and the lessons learned along the way of creating CD Baby and building a business close to his heart. “[Sivers is] one of the last music-business folk heroes,” says Esquire magazine. His less-scripted approach to business is refreshing and will educate readers to feel empowered to follow their own dreams. Aspiring entrepreneurs and others trying to make their own way will be particularly comforted by Sivers straight talk and transparency -a reminder that anything you want is within your reach. Anything You Want is also available in a 5 pack, 52 pack and very limited edition Collectible, signed by Derek.

    But what if everyone is wrong?In their acclaimed bestseller The Challenger Sale, Matthew Dixon and his colleagues at CEB busted longstanding myths about sales. Now they've turned to a new vital business subject - customer loyalty - with a book that turns conventional wisdom on its head.Companies devote untold time and resources trying to dazzle customers. Yet CEB's careful research proves that is wildly overrated: loyalty has a lot more to do with how well companies deliver on their basic promises than on how dazzling the service experience might be. Forget bells and whistles and just solve your customer's problems. The Effortless Experience lays out the four pillars of a low-effort customer experience, with robust data, in­sights and profiles. Here are tools and templates you can start applying right away to improve service, reduce costs, and ultimately generate the elusive loyalty that the 'dazzle factor' fails to deliver.The rewards are there for the taking, and the pathway to achieving them is now clearly marked.'A business detective story, in which cherished truths are systematically investigated-and frequently debunked' -Dan Heath, coauthor of Decisive, Switch, and Made to StickMatt Dixon is Executive Director of the Sales & Service Practice at CEB. He is a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review, and his previous book, The Challenger Sale, was a Wall Street Journal bestsellerNick Toman is Senior Director of Research for CEB's Sales & Services Practice and is a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review.Rick DeLisi is Senior Director of Advisory Services for CEB's Sales & Service Practice and a noted public speaker and facilitator.

    Meanwhile, people with important ideas--entrepreneurs, teachers, politicians, and journalists--struggle to make them "stick."In Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath reveal the anatomy of ideas that stick and explain ways to make ideas stickier, such as applying the human scale principle, using the Velcro Theory of Memory, and creating curiosity gaps. Along the way, we discover that sticky messages of all kinds--from the infamous "kidney theft ring" hoax to a coach's lessons on sportsmanship to a vision for a new product at Sony--draw their power from the same six traits.Made to Stick will transform the way you communicate. It's a fast-paced tour of success stories (and failures): the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who drank a glass of bacteria to prove a point about stomach ulcers; the charities who make use of the Mother Teresa Effect; the elementary-school teacher whose simulation actually prevented racial prejudice.Provocative, eye-opening, and often surprisingly funny, Made to Stick shows us the vital principles of winning ideas--and tells us how we can apply these rules to making our own messages stick.

    The value chain. Five forces. Industry structure. Differentiation. Relative cost. If you want to understand how companies achieve and sustain competitive success, Michael Porter’s frameworks are the foundation. But while everyone in business may know Porter’s name, many managers misunderstand and misuse his concepts.Understanding Michael Porter sets the record straight, providing the first concise, accessible summary of Porter’s revolutionary thinking. Written with Porter’s full cooperation by Joan Magretta, his former editor at Harvard Business Review, this new book delivers fresh, clear examples to illustrate and update Porter’s ideas.Magretta uses her wide business experience to translate Porter’s powerful insights into practice and to correct the most common misconceptions about them—for instance, that competition is about being unique, not being the best; that it is a contest over profits, not a battle between rivals; that strategy is about choosing to make some customers unhappy, not being all things to all customers.An added feature is an original Q&A with Porter himself, which includes answers to managers’ FAQs.Eminently readable, this book will enable every manager in your organization to grasp Porter’s ideas—and swiftly deploy them to drive your company’s success.

    Womack, Chairman and Founder, Lean Enterprise Institute. This game-changing book puts you behind the curtain of Toyota, providing new insight into the legendary automaker's management practices and offering practical guidance for leading and developing people in a way that makes the best use of their brainpower. Drawing on six years of research into Toyota's employee-management routines, Toyota Kata examines and elucidates, for the first time, the company's organizational routines--called kata--that power its success with continuous improvement and adaptation. The book also reaches beyond Toyota to explain issues of human behavior in organizations and provide specific answers to questions such as: How can we make improvement and adaptation part of everyday work throughout the organization? How can we develop and utilize the capability of everyone in the organization to repeatedly work toward and achieve new levels of performance? How can we give an organization the power to handle dynamic, unpredictable situations and keep satisfying customers? Mike Rother explains how to improve our prevailing management approach through the use of two kata: Improvement Kata--a repeating routine of establishing challenging target conditions, working step-by-step through obstacles, and always learning from the problems we encounter; and Coaching Kata: a pattern of teaching the improvement kata to employees at every level to ensure it motivates their ways of thinking and acting. With clear detail, an abundance of practical examples, and a cohesive explanation from start to finish, Toyota Kata gives executives and managers at any level actionable routines of thought and behavior that produce superior results and sustained competitive advantage.

    A Problem2. Peter Pigeonhole Prepared A Petition3. What's Your Problem?Part 2: What is The Problem?4. Billy Brighteyes Bests The Bidders5. Billy Bites His Tongue6. Billy Back To The BiddersPart 3: What is The Problem Really?7. The Endless Chain8. Missing The Misfit9. Landing On The Level10. Mind Your MeaningPart 4: Whose Problem Is It?11. Smoke Gets In Your Eyes12. The Campus That Was All Spaced Out13. The Lights At The End Of The TunnelPart 5: Where Does It Come From?14. Janet Jaworski Joggles A Jerk15. Mister Matczyszyn Mends The Matter16. Make-Works And Take-Credits17. Examinations And Other PuzzlesPart 6: Do We Really Want To Solve It?18. Tom Tireless Tinkers With Toys19. Patience Plays Politics20. A Priority Assignment

    It's not the star.It's not money. It's not a strategy.It's something else entirely.Several years ago, Sam Walker set out to answer one of the most hotly debated questions in sports: What are the greatest teams of all time? He devised a formula, then applied it to thousands of teams from leagues all over the world, from the NBA to the English Premier League to Olympic field hockey. When he was done, he had a list of the sixteen most dominant teams in history. At that point, he became obsessed with another, more complicated question: What did these freak teams have in common?As Walker dug into their stories, a pattern emerged: Each team had the same type of captain--a singular leader with an unconventional skill set who drove it to achieve sustained, historic greatness.Fueled by a lifetime of sports spectating, twenty years of reporting, and a decade of painstaking research, The Captain Class tells the surprising story of what makes teams exceptional. Drawing on original interviews with athletes from two dozen countries, as well as general managers, coaches, executives, and others skilled at building teams, Walker identifies the seven core qualities of this Captain Class--from extreme doggedness and emotional control to a knack for nonverbal communication to tactical aggression and the courage to stand apart.Told through riveting accounts of some of the most pressure-soaked moments in sports history--from Bill Russell's legendary "Coleman Play" in the 1957 NBA Finals to Barcelona's "Figo Game" against Real Madrid in 2000--The Captain Class doesn't just bring these events to life; it presents a fresh, counterintuitive take on leadership that can be applied to a wide spectrum of competitive disciplines.The men and women who make up the Captain Class were never the most skilled athletes, nor were they gifted orators or paragons of sportsmanship. They were often role players who were allergic to the spotlight. In short, the seven attributes they shared challenge your assumptions of what inspired leadership looks like.

    Through four years of groundbreaking research, Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim set out to find a way to measure software delivery performance—and what drives it—using rigorous statistical methods. This book presents both the findings and the science behind that research. Readers will discover how to measure the performance of their teams, and what capabilities they should invest in to drive higher performance.

    This radically simple concept is the heart of Leaders Open Doors.This book presents a fresh and unique take on leadership that will benefit experienced leaders and those just starting their leadership journeys. With a little courage, anyone at any level can be a leader.Drawing on two decades of experience, author and speaker, Bill Treasurer, in this new second edition, combines personal stories and anecdotes to illustrate how (and how not) to inspire people. He approaches these ideas with the belief that great leadership is not hierarchical--it is the peoples' willingness to take initiative and reach their goals that is crucial to successful leadership.

    Find out how the Swedish police combined XP, Scrum, and Kanban in a 60-person project. From start to finish, you'll see how to deliver a successful product using Lean principles. We start with an organization in desperate need of a new way of doing things and finish with a group of sixty, all working in sync to develop a scalable, complex system. You'll walk through the project step by step, from customer engagement, to the daily "cocktail party," version control, bug tracking, and release. In this honest look at what works--and what doesn't--you'll find out how to: Make quality everyone's business, not just the testers. Keep everyone moving in the same direction without micromanagement. Use simple and powerful metrics to aid in planning and process improvement. Balance between low-level feature focus and high-level system focus. You'll be ready to jump into the trenches and streamline your own development process.ContentsForewordPrefacePART I: HOW WE WORK1. About the Project1.1 Timeline 51.2 How We Sliced the Elephant 61.3 How We Involved the Customer 72. Structuring the Teams3. Attending the Daily Cocktail Party3.1 First Tier: Feature Team Daily Stand-up3.2 Second Tier: Sync Meetings per Specialty3.3 Third Tier: Project Sync Meeting4. The Project Board4.1 Our Cadences4.2 How We Handle Urgent Issues and Impediments5. Scaling the Kanban Boards6. Tracking the High-Level Goal7. Defining Ready and Done7.1 Ready for Development7.2 Ready for System Test7.3 How This Improved Collaboration 8. Handling Tech Stories8.1 Example 1: System Test Bottleneck8.2 Example 2: Day Before the Release8.3 Example 3: The 7-Meter Class9. Handling Bugs9.1 Continuous System Test9.2 Fix the Bugs Immediately9.3 Why We Limit the Number of Bugs in the Bug Tracker9.4 Visualizing Bugs9.5 Preventing Recurring Bugs10. Continuously Improving the Process10.1 Team Retrospectives10.2 Process Improvement Workshops10.3 Managing the Rate of Change11. Managing Work in Progress11.1 Using WIP Limits11.2 Why WIP Limits Apply Only to Features12. Capturing and Using Process Metrics12.1 Velocity (Features per Week)12.2 Why We Don’t Use Story Points12.3 Cycle Time (Weeks per Feature)12.4 Cumulative Flow12.5 Process Cycle Efficiency13. Planning the Sprint and Release13.1 Backlog Grooming13.2 Selecting the Top Ten Features13.3 Why We Moved Backlog Grooming Out of the Sprint Planning Meeting13.4 Planning the Release14. How We Do Version Control14.1 No Junk on the Trunk14.2 Team Branches14.3 System Test Branch15. Why We Use Only Physical Kanban Boards16. What We Learned16.1 Know Your Goal16.2 Experiment16.3 Embrace Failure16.4 Solve Real Problems16.5 Have Dedicated Change Agents16.6 Involve PeoplePART II: A CLOSER LOOK AT THE TECHNIQUES 17. Agile and Lean in a Nutshell17.1 Agile in a Nutshell17.2 Lean in a Nutshell17.3 Scrum in a Nutshell17.4 XP in a Nutshell17.5 Kanban in a Nutshell18. Reducing the Test Automation Backlog18.1 What to Do About It18.2 How to Improve Test Coverage a Little Bit Each Iteration18.3 Step 1: List Your Test Cases18.4 Step 2: Classify Each Test18.5 Step 3: Sort the List in Priority Order18.6 Step 4: Automate a Few Tests Each Iteration18.7 Does This Solve the Problem?19. Sizing the Backlog with Planning Poker19.1 Estimating Without Planning Poker19.2 Estimating with Planning Poker19.3 Special Cards20. Cause-Effect Diagrams20.1 Solve Problems, Not Symptoms20.2 The Lean Problem-Solving Approach: A3 Thinking20.3 How to Use Cause-Effect Diagrams20.4 Example 1: Long Release Cycle20.5 Example 2: Defects Released to Production20.6 Example 3: Lack of Pair Programming20.7 Example 4: Lots of Problems20.8 Practical Issues: How to Create and Maintain the Diagrams20.9 Pitfalls20.10 Why Use Cause-Effect Diagrams?21. Final WordsA1. Glossary: How We Avoid Buzzword BingoIndex

    That’s not always easy: Maybe you’re not sure what kind of data your stakeholders will trust. Or perhaps you’re intimidated by number crunching.The HBR Guide to Building Your Business Case , written by project management expert Raymond Sheen, gives you the guidance and tools you need to make a strong case. You’ll learn how to:• Spell out the business need for your idea• Align your case with strategic goals• Build the right team to shape and test your idea• Calculate the return on investment• Analyze risks and opportunities• Present your case to stakeholders

    More and more frequently, ScrumMasters and project managers are being asked to coach agile teams. But it's a challenging role. It requires new skills--as well as a subtle understanding of when to step in and when to step back. Migrating from "command and control" to agile coaching requires a whole new mind-set. In Coaching Agile Teams, Lyssa Adkins gives agile coaches the insights they need to adopt this new mind-set and to guide teams to extraordinary performance in a re-energized work environment. You'll gain a deep view into the role of the agile coach, discover what works and what doesn't, and learn how to adapt powerful skills from many allied disciplines, including the fields of professional coaching and mentoring. Coverage includes Understanding what it takes to be a great agile coach Mastering all of the agile coach's roles: teacher, mentor, problem solver, conflict navigator, and performance coach Creating an environment where self-organized, high-performance teams can emerge Coaching teams past cooperation and into full collaboration Evolving your leadership style as your team grows and changes Staying actively engaged without dominating your team and stunting its growth Recognizing failure, recovery, and success modes in your coaching Getting the most out of your own personal agile coaching journey Whether you're an agile coach, leader, trainer, mentor, facilitator, ScrumMaster, project manager, product owner, or team member, this book will help you become skilled at helping others become truly great. What could possibly be more rewarding?