If you’ve read my first article on getting started with No-Code tools, you’ll remember that I was trying to build a proof of concept of a new SaaS business concept. My requirements were: Users need to be able to authenticate. Users need to be able to build and maintain an…

I have a business idea for a new SaaS application, but I’m a busy mom with a full time job as a Senior Product Manager at a well-known Silicon Valley SaaS company. While I have a tech background, I haven’t coded full-time in years. Rather than dusting off my Rails…

A status report template to prevent middle management from costing your company millions — The Process Every Friday, my engineering manager writes a detailed status report. He even takes time to find a random “fun fact” to make them more interesting and encourage people to read to the bottom. On Mondays, my job as Product Manager is to take that report and condense it down into…

Is that team offsite in Mexico worth sacrificing family time? — I was recently invited to speak at DevOps Days Chicago, several hundred miles away from my home. This will be my first multi-day business trip since my daughter was born almost five years ago. As I’ve been preparing my slides, I’ve also been preparing my child care arrangements and realizing…

Writing user stories is a good practice, but for articulating business outcomes, they are not enough. Let’s talk about how to share a compelling product narrative. — Once upon a time, I thought writing a good set of agile user stories with specific Given/When/Then acceptance criteria was the most important part of a product person’s job. I had recently made the switch from software engineering to product and was committed to spelling out requirements in a user-centric…

Lessons from my dad on building a team, a business, and a life worth living — My father was a great man. It has been six years since he died at age 56. I miss him every day. The gnawing hole he left behind never gets easier to hide, but it has become a familiar struggle. Glen Riesterer, my father, was a great man by all…

Trigger warning: Graphic description of miscarriage My heart has been breaking all day for the women of Texas. I know I typically write about product management and software engineering, but I needed a space to process my grief, trauma, and fear. …

“It was missing a piece. And it was not happy. So it set off in search of its missing piece.” — Shel Silverstein, The Missing Piece — In Shel Silverstein’s classic children’s story The Missing Piece, an incomplete circle slowly rolls along, talking to worms, falling into holes, and enjoying the company of butterflies as it searches for its missing piece. Meanwhile, the Missing Piece is waiting out there, somewhere, hoping the circle will come and find…

What is Cycle Time? Cycle Time, the time it takes for a user story or other task to go through the software development lifecycle, is a common metric used in Kanban. It replaces velocity as a measure of efficiency and predictability for a team. If we consider the very simple JIRA Kanban board above…