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Thanks for the comment! These frameworks are all useful, but you have to understand where each one is coming from, right?

Thanks Virendra!

Thanks! Let me know what you're interested in seeing more of? Hard skills? Soft skills?

Thanks @erik!

That’s a really good question. It's a little bit outside the topic of this video, and I think there are some good resources out there for doing keyword comparison between the job listing and your resume. I feel that this is a terrible way for companies to sort out candidates, but as a job seeker you do have to take these ATS systems into account. Obviously, the best way to avoid them is to have some kind of personal connection to the hiring manager, whether through a friend or colleague, or from doing an informational interview, or something like that.

Battina - sorry for the delay on replying. I'll try to get something created for you in the next few weeks. I have a few other things on my plate in the near term, but I should be able to get something put up after that.

@@secretsofproductmanagement Thank you for your time

Vinai - feel free to drop me a line at nils@secretpmhandbook.com.

Good luck with *your* story - let me know how it goes!

I'm sorry to say I haven't finished reading it yet! It's my current read on Kindle. Lots of good insights so far.

@tim - I do not actually always write in the morning. I consider it a daily process, so I try to get it done before I go to bed :-) It's better to get them done earlier for sure. At the moment I tend to do them in the afternoon or evening, because my commute just went up by 1/2 hour, making it harder to accomplish in the morning. If I'm writing in the afternoon - i.e., at work, I definitely try to focus on a "work-related assignment" as I discuss in the video.

@amer - I think a lot of agilists would consider this bad. And hopefully, over time you and your team can develop a sense of how much you really can deliver in a sprint. But, in Reality World, I think it's not a bad practice. You have two big conflicting things going on: 1) the time constraint of a sprint, and 2) the impossibility of making good predictions of how long a story will take to develop. Using short sprints and story point poker are methods to reduce that conflict, but it can't be eliminated completely. In fact, the question you should ask is "when I remove some stories for safety, do we get everything done in the sprint, or do we still have overflow?" You want to ask that in the spirit of learning, not blaming. I'm sure your team is working as fast as it can. Missing a sprint deliverable can be due to any of a number of reasons: the story was a little more complex than we thought, there were some conditions we didn't account for in the original story, when we started testing the story we realized we needed to handle another case, a developer got the flu, and many more. It's usually not because the team wasn't doing its best.

Also, by the way, sorry about the video. For some reason my video upload just wasn't working. Probably due to the fact that it was about 100 degrees (F) in my house at the time, and both laptop and router were unhappy.

@@secretsofproductmanagement Thank you for replying. I agree it's bad but I find myself forced to do that for cultural reasons which is something that we deal with a lot in the Middle East. For example, no one can say no to an executive or the CEO. The CEO comes with a "tiny request" or takes away our designer to help marketing. One of the developers claims that he can deliver something but turns out he lied because he's afraid of losing his job and is trying to learn how to do the thing. Some cultural differences in implementing Agile that I have to take into consideration. It shouldn't be this way but this is the reality. Of course, I try to educate the team and the executives as much as possible but changing a culture takes some time. Anyway, thanks for your reply. btw, I'm re-reading your book now to prepare for a job interview. If I do get the job, which will be in Austin Texas, I would really love to have a few mentoring sessions if your time allows it. Thanks a lot and have a great weekend

@@TexasBedouin I guess what you're saying is that the Middle East is a lot like all the other compass points ;-) Seriously, most of face or have faced all of those problems at times.

Paola - nothing like a simple question to start out with! The question of how to make an agile transition within a company can be really tough, even if it's for just one project. I think, as I mention in the video, that it's important to focus on the "we're delivering value fast" message - and of course, you have to deliver value fast! In some ways that's as much the product manager's job to articulate as it is the team's job to deliver. That is, the product manager needs to be able to tell the story about the value the team is delivering to the customer. If you can do that well, and the team can deliver fast, or as fast as it can, then that will go a long way to keeping the executives off your back.

Amer - remember that your B2C customers are people too. This means that they love to talk about themselves. So, you ask them about their problems in the domain your application addresses. You can certainly give them an incentive for answering (Amazon and Starbucks gift cards are pretty common here in the States), but you don't always need to. I mentioned Teresa Torres in the video (and I recommend reading her blog). She went to a mall in Detroit with a team from an automotive parts supplier and they just started asking people in the food court about their cars. You can start pretty simple!

@@secretsofproductmanagement I just signed up for her course and newsletter. Thanks a lot. Have a great weekend

Thanks for the comment. It's so hard for us technologists to keep in "problem space" - but it's really where the money is, so to speak.

Manoj - what are your questions about product planning?

I hope you got the job!