Creating high-quality software for the enterprise involves a much different set of challenges. In this practical book, two expert product managers provide straightforward guidance for people looking to join the thriving enterprise market.Authors Blair Reeves and Benjamin Gaines explain critical differences between enterprise and consumer products, and deliver strategies for overcoming challenges when building for the enterprise. You'll learn how to cultivate knowledge of your organization, the products you build, and the industry you serve.Explore why:Identifying customer vs user problems is an enterprise project manager's main challengeEffective collaboration requires in-depth knowledge of the organizationAnalyzing data is key to understanding why users buy and retain your productHaving experience in the industry you're building products for is valuableProduct longevity depends on knowing where the industry is headed

    Rose Randall is the archetypical reluctant project manager. Following a painful project failure years ago, Rose s life is cast into chaos when she is once again thrown into the role against her wishes. Faced with a struggling project, help comes from an unexpected source guiding Rose in the direction of Real Options.When you have read Commitment , you:* understand what the Real Options model is;* can apply the Real Options model to manage project risks successfully;* understand why much of your life involves options that you currently are treating as commitments;* see the world through a different filter opening up many new possibilities;* understand the difference between Commitments and Options.Because the book will:* provide specific examples of how a project can manage its risks using the Real Options model;* outline a simple technique for making decisions;* make you aware of all the decisions you make every day;* build your confidence in your ability to decide when to commit and when to leave options open.In short, this book is indispensable for new and experienced project managers plus anyone else who is interested in knowing more about managing large projects.

    Creating something from nothing is an unpredictable journey. The first mile births a new idea into existence, and the final mile is all about letting go. We love talking about starts and finishes, even though the middle stretch is the most important and often the most ignored and misunderstood.    Broken into three sections with 100+ lessons, this no-nonsense book will help you: • Endure the roller coaster of successes and failures by strengthening your resolve, embracing the long-game, and short-circuiting your reward system to get to the finish line. • Optimize what’s working so you can improve the way you hire, better manage your team, and meet your customers’ needs. • Finish strong and avoid the pitfalls many entrepreneurs make, so you can overcome resistance, exit gracefully, and continue onto your next creative endeavor with ease. With insightful interviews from today’s leading entrepreneurs, artists, writers, and executives, as well as Belsky’s own experience working with companies like Airbnb, Pinterest, Uber, and sweetgreen, The Messy Middle will outfit you to find your way through the hardest parts of any bold project or new venture.

    But honest and open conversations are not taking place between management and Agile delivery teams.In A Seat at the Table, CIO Mark Schwartz explores the role of IT leadership as it is now and opens the door to reveal IT leadership as it should be - an integral part of the value creation engine. With wit and easy style, Schwartz reveals that the only way to become an Agile IT leader is to be courageous - to throw off the attitude and assumptions that have kept CIOs from taking their rightful seat at the table. CIOs, step on up, your seat at the table is waiting for you.Listening Length: 9 hours and 20 minutes

    Today, software organizations are transforming the way work gets done through practices like Agile, Lean, and DevOps. But as commonly implemented as these methods are, many transformations still fail, largely because the organization misses a critical step: transforming their culture and the way people communicate. Agile Conversations brings a practical, step-by-step guide to using the human power of conversation to build effective, high-performing teams to achieve truly Agile results. Consultants Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick show readers how to utilize the Five Conversations to help teams build trust, alleviate fear, answer the "whys," define commitments, and hold everyone accountable.These five conversations give teams everything they need to reach peak performance, and they are exactly what's missing from too many teams today. Stop focusing on processes and practices that leave your organization stuck with culture-less rituals. Instead, unleash the unique human power of conversation.

    The Art of Action is a thought-provoking and fresh look at how managers can turn planning into execution, and execution into results.Drawing on his experience as a consultant, senior manager and a highly respected military historian, Stephen Bungay takes a close look at the nineteenth-century Prussian Army, which built its agility on the initiative of its highly empowered junior officers, to show business leaders how they can build more effective, productive organizations. Based on a theoretical framework which has been tested in practice over 150 years, Bungay shows how the approach known as "mission command" has been applied in businesses as diverse as pharmaceuticals and F1 racing today. The Art of Action is scholarly but engaging, rigorous but pragmatic, and shows how common sense can sometimes be surprising.

    How has Google done it? Veteran technology reporter Steven Levy was granted unprecedented access to the company, and in this revelatory book he takes readers inside Google headquarters—the Googleplex—to show how Google works.While they were still students at Stanford, Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin revolutionized Internet search. They followed this brilliant innovation with another, as two of Google’s earliest employees found a way to do what no one else had: make billions of dollars from Internet advertising. With this cash cow, Google was able to expand dramatically and take on other transformative projects: more efficient data centers, open-source cell phones, free Internet video (YouTube), cloud computing, digitizing books, and much more.The key to Google’s success in all these businesses, Levy reveals, is its engineering mind-set and adoption of such Internet values as speed, openness, experimentation, and risk taking. After its unapologetically elitist approach to hiring, Google pampers its engineers—free food and dry cleaning, on-site doctors and masseuses—and gives them all the resources they need to succeed. Even today, with a workforce of more than 23,000, Larry Page signs off on every hire.But has Google lost its innovative edge? With its newest initiative, social networking, Google is chasing a successful competitor for the first time. Some employees are leaving the company for smaller, nimbler start-ups. Can the company that famously decided not to be evil still compete?No other book has ever turned Google inside out as Levy does with In the Plex.

    But as the field evolves, designers enter the field from many disciplines. Practitioners today have enough experience in UI design that they have been exposed to design rules, but it is essential that they understand the psychology behind the rules in order to effectively apply them. In "Designing with the Mind in Mind," Jeff Johnson, author of the best selling "GUI Bloopers," provides designers with just enough background in perceptual and cognitive psychology that UI design guidelines make intuitive sense rather than being just a list of rules to follow. * The first practical, all-in-one source for practitioners on user interface design rules and why, when and how to apply them.* Provides just enough background into the reasoning behind interface design rules that practitioners can make informed decisions in every project.* Gives practitioners the insight they need to make educated design decisions when confronted with tradeoffs, including competing design rules, time constrictions, or limited resources.

    Combining his candid insights with a rigorous analysis of Toyota's attempts at Lean production, Ohno's book explains how Lean principles can improve any production endeavor. A historical and philosophical description of just-in-time and Lean manufacturing, this work is a must read for all students of human progress. On a more practical level, it continues to provide inspiration and instruction for those seeking to improve efficiency through the elimination of waste.

    In performance, how you organize can be the key to growth. In the past five years, the business world has seen the birth of a new breed of company - the Exponential Organization - that has revolutionized how a company can accelerate its growth by using technology.

    With this practical book, you’ll learn how to design effective microinteractions: the small details that exist inside and around features. How can users change a setting? How do they turn on mute, or know they have a new email message?Through vivid, real-world examples from today’s devices and applications, author Dan Saffer walks you through a microinteraction’s essential parts, then shows you how to use them in a mobile app, a web widget, and an appliance. You’ll quickly discover how microinteractions can change a product from one that’s tolerated into one that’s treasured.Explore a microinteraction’s structure: triggers, rules, feedback, modes, and loopsLearn the types of triggers that initiate a microinteractionCreate simple rules that define how your microinteraction can be usedHelp users understand the rules with feedback, using graphics, sounds, and vibrationsUse modes to let users set preferences or modify a microinteractionExtend a microinteraction’s life with loops, such as “Get data every 30 seconds”

    This practical book demonstrates how entire organizations—from product managers and engineers to marketers and executives—can put Agile to work. Author Matt LeMay explains Agile in clear, jargon-free terms and provides concrete and actionable steps to help any team put its values and principles into practice. Examples from a wide variety of organizations, including small nonprofits and global financial enterprises, bring to life the on-the-ground realities of Agile across industries and functions. Understand exactly what Agile is and why it matters Use Agile to address your organization’s specific needs and goals Take customer centricity from theory into practice Stop wasting time in "report and critique" meetings and start making better decisions Create a harmonious cycle of learning, collaborating, and delivering Learn from Agile experts at companies like IBM, Spotify, and Coca-Cola

    In Working Backwards, these two long-serving Amazon executives reveal and codify the principles and practices that drive the success of one of the most extraordinary companies the world has ever known. With twenty-seven years of Amazon experience between them, much of it in the early aughts—a period of unmatched innovation that brought products and services including Kindle, Amazon Prime, Amazon Studios, and Amazon Web Services to life—Bryar and Carr offer unprecedented access to the Amazon way as it was refined, articulated, and proven to be repeatable, scalable, and adaptable.With keen analysis and practical steps for applying it at your own company—no matter the size—the authors illuminate how Amazon’s fourteen leadership principles inform decision-making at all levels and reveal how the company’s culture has been defined by four characteristics: customer obsession, long-term thinking, eagerness to invent, and operational excellence. Bryar and Carr explain the set of ground-level practices that ensure these are translated into action and flow through all aspects of the business.Working Backwards is a practical guidebook and a corporate narrative, filled with the authors’ in-the-room recollections of what “Being Amazonian” is like and how it has affected their personal and professional lives. They demonstrate that success on Amazon’s scale is not achieved by the genius of any single leader, but rather through commitment to and execution of a set of well-defined, rigorously-executed principles and practices—shared here for the very first time. A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin's Press

    Crossing the Chasm has become the bible for bringing cutting-edge products to progressively larger markets. This edition provides new insights into the realities of high-tech marketing, with special emphasis on the Internet. It's essential reading for anyone with a stake in the world's most exciting marketplace.

    Kerth guides readers through productive, empowering retrospectives of project performance.Whether your shop calls them postmortems or postpartums or something else, project retrospectives offer organizations a formal method for preserving the valuable lessons learned from the successes and failures of every project. These lessons and the changes identified by the community will foster stronger teams and savings on subsequent efforts.For a retrospective to be effective and successful, though, it needs to be safe. Kerth shows facilitators and participants how to defeat the fear of retribution and establish an air of mutual trust. One tool is Kerth's Prime Directive:Regardless of what we discover, we must understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job he or she could, given what was known at the time, his or her skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.Applying years of experience as a project retrospective facilitator for software organizations, Kerth reveals his secrets for managing the sensitive, often emotionally charged issues that arise as teams relive and learn from each project.Don't move on to your next project without consulting and using this readable, practical handbook. Each member of your team will be better prepared for the next deadline.