Quicker to produce and available in lower costs, they often feature a lot of complex designs.

I’ve got some ideas for your blog you might be interested in hearing. Either way, great blog and I look forward to seeing it grow over time.

The use case narrative describes the normal and alternative flow, but not necessarily the requirements of the features; here the stories fulfill this role.

Like many aspects of agile, I have found this to be a nuanced aspect as well. All code “has architecture” – either intentional or emergent. In the early 2000′s we would look at refactoring of the architecture to meet emerging needs as an expected and “good” thing. I think it was Kent Beck who said the architecture needs to support only what the code is attempting to do today – and when greater needs are introduced, the architecture may need to evolve.

While that is true, I’ve also found that some thinking ahead about future needs does help with both reducing the effort to introduce those new capabilities. There are times where the assumptions implicit in architectural choices all but neuter the ability of the team to adapt to changing requirements. An example that comes to mind is adding support for multiple users of a tablet device. Many assumptions within a mobile OS break when the notion of “is this user allowed to do X?” is introduced because the notion of multiple users is simply non-existent.

On the flip side, I’ve seen teams incur excessive costs because they had to jump through hoops to meet the needs of an architecture that anticipated future needs that may never come to pass. It is a tough balancing act.

I also wonder how many teams make these choices poorly.

Thanks again for the great comment!

….requires an architecture to break.

I wonder how many projects miss the mark because they did not design the software within an architecture/framework/”the way we do things”/”the way we name things”/”What a thing means”/”list of definitions?”

Does anyone recommend a current product for BPMN diagramming?

I really appreciate your stencils, but I’d like to suggest an improvement: It would be great if you included a horizontal pool and lanes that snap, glue, resize automatically and don’t overlap, in the same way as those in Visio’s built-in cross-functional flowchart. I don’t use the built-in pool and lane because, 1) I don’t like the position of the title bar and the presence of the additional band below it; 2) it lacks a pool name braced over the lane headings; and, 3) perhaps most importantly: it won’t allow a separate, white box pool to be added to the same diagram (it wants to merge the lanes into the first pool). It’d be wonderful if you could emulate the built-in pool and lanes, but without the annoying features I mentioned.

Cheers
Brandon

I think this is part of why Paul Young put together his X-Factor presentation. He identifies the “soft skills” you need to be effective organizationally. If I were to ask “how does a product manager get a seat at the (strategy) table?” I believe the answer would start here.

In fact I have seen more and more roles in the industry here in the UK calling for Dr of Product and Strategy – the evolution has begun, as people see that GOOD PRODUCTS become the cash cows of their business, then surely by default, those that KNOW PRODUCT should be part of those earlier discussions and yes SHOULD ABSOLUTELY get to define the overall business strategy.

Look at BSkyB for an example in the UK – their entire business strategy had to evolve through mobile and online products in order not to get outplayed….Product Specialists in that move, absolutely defined the business strategy. (Sorry if that reference does not carry globally, but I assure you it’s a good one! ;-)

If you are as passionate as I am about Product Management and Product Strategy and are based in London then please join my Google+ community and start sharing. https://plus.google.com/communities/11226933616018