Monday, February 25, 2008

Project | Product Management

I have come to acknowledge a few core principles that are important to guiding projects and products through conception, development and release. I just want to get them down here for now. I'll come back to add to them and expand upon them further in the near future.

You can't know how effective you're being if you don't know what your goals are.
It is critical to understand how to define requirements in the domain of the client, and to be able map those requirements to the technical execution process.

Change is the only constant. Knowing how to adapt is the key to successful projects.
It is important to understand the likely sources of change, to build variability into the scope of a project, and to control the outcome.

Multidisciplinary excellence is the road to true happiness.
Being able to communicate effectively and with native competence in the creative, technical and business realms is central to managing a modern project.

Focused design is incredibly effective.
Attention is finite, for both developers and users. Keeping an application focused on its most salient elements will deliver a more effective and compelling product.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good words.

orag said...

However, the thing that is rarely discussed is what is ultimately out of the project team's hands and that is the commitment on the stakeholders' side to provide the kind of leadership and follow-through that is needed.