Articles on Product Management
Why Do You Need a Product Manager?
Carbon Five began as a development shop almost nineteen years ago and added the Product Management discipline fourteen years into our journey. We have realized the importance of involving a Product Manager, who is dedicated to gathering requirements and can easily handle the business and technical aspects required to build successful products. There are many …
Happy Teams Build Great Products. Here’s How.
Ever feel like your product team is not working to its full potential? Here at Carbon Five, we’ve worked with hundreds of product teams, and we wondered what differentiated strong teams from struggling teams. Our curiosity drove us to create the Product Dartboard, a digital tool that helps teams identify their strengths, challenges, and blind …
Carbon Five Wins Amplitude Emerging Product Leaders Award
We were honored to receive the award for Outstanding Product Agency in Amplitude’s Emerging Product Leaders Awards. This award is for the agency that provides clients the best product development, growth, or strategy support. At Carbon Five, product managers help clients to transform their vision into reality. We also build high-performing teams, mentoring client PMs …
Product Management Resources for Designers
Product Managers are awesome! They keep goals in mind and priorities at the forefront – and when designers get to work with them, it’s a real treat. Clearly, there is a lot of overlap in skill sets, but sometimes you’ll find yourself on a team without a dedicated PM. So if you’re a designer in …
Minimum Viable Process
If I mention the word “agile” to you, a couple of rituals common to agile methodologies probably come to mind. Daily stand-ups and iteration planning probably top the list, and you probably think of other agile concepts like user stories and estimating their complexity with an arbitrary number of points.
Lean Canvas as a Prioritization Tool
We <3 Prioritizing In modern software processes, prioritization is at the core of what we do. We prioritize because we don’t like waste. Waste: Of human effort, which is disrespectful. Of money. Of time. If you’re wasting one of them, you’re probably wasting all of them. Prioritizing is variously simple, complicated, demanding, exhausting, and strangely …
Using Strategy as a Prioritization Tool
We <3 Prioritizing In modern software processes, prioritization is at the core of what we do. We prioritize because we don’t like waste. Waste: Of human effort, which is disrespectful. Of money. Of time. If you’re wasting one of them, you’re probably wasting all of them. Prioritizing is variously simple, complicated, demanding, exhausting, and strangely …
The 2×2 Method
In a discussion about prioritization among product managers at Carbon Five, we were in consensus that a 2×2 is a powerful tool in many prioritization scenarios from assessing risks to the product or business to working out the path forward when faced with competing priorities for a product. As a visualization tool, a 2×2 gets …
The First Rule of Agile is Don’t Talk About Agile
I asked a group of fellow product managers if they’ve ever read through the Agile Manifesto with product owners / clients. They all said “no”, and the general consensus was that doing so wouldn’t be well received. This is interesting. Even though Carbon Five is well-respected for our process, and we definitely practice agile, we’re …
Book Review: Matt LeMay’s Product Management in Practice
We just received our copies of O’Reilly’s latest Product Management title, Product Management in Practice: A Real-World Guide to the Key Connective Role of the 21st Century, by Matt LeMay.