Category Technology

How to use Story Mapping for complex Products and Features

product manager venn diagram

Product Management professionals have a lot of unique challenges which make the job interesting. An important Agile Product Manager skill is to effectively demonstrate how a feature will evolve, before it even exists. With Agile, a product is in various states as it grows from minimum viable experiment, to minimum viable product, to minimum marketable product to name a few. Product Managers need to communicate this evolution precisely, or else you introduce risk. Complex features with many dependencies make this more challenging. Once I learned (thanks Kevin Callahan) and implemented story mapping for complex epic size features, many of these challenges became a lot easier.

One problem with PRDs (product requirements documents) is that they show a lot of how something will look when i...

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Tablo TV review, an over the air DVR

Photo of tablo tv receiver recorder
Tablo TV review
Reviewed by: Chris Thompson,
The verdict: Good product, slow
To summarize: The Tablo TV solution is great if you want a DVR for over the air broadcast television. The subscription is a lot cheaper than TiVo, but it’s still new and a bit slow for most. Rating: 3.5

Tablo TV is an interesting method of adding a DVR to over the air television. It’s also pretty reasonably priced at under $200 to start. Instead of your TV receiving the decoding the signal from your antennae, the antennae connects directly to your Tablo TV box. You also connect a USB hard drive that you supply. Tablo supports WiFi and a LAN cable, so I used LAN with my ASUS RT-N66U Dual-Band Wireless-N900 Gigabit Router just to make it a little faster and more responsive.

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Google maps wrong location, still not fixed?

Location updates must be needed all the time for Google maps – so I’m not sure why after reporting this several times using Google’s interface it still hasn’t been fixed? Here’s a Google maps wrong location example:


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I’ll keep reporting it or maybe this post will get their attention 🙂

*Update 3/18/2014*
Made a phone call to Google (1-877-355-5787) and they were able to correct this on their side; the business started showing the correct address results within 48 hours. Very nice Google, and may I suggest some indication to call Google support if you repeatedly can’t get your business address correctly updated on your own.



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Facebook removes photo comments feature on pages, brings them back after adding support

Actions you can do on Facebook

Update:
Faceback once again has brought back user photo comments, as of July. After adding a feature toggle switch for this in admin panel and adding API support, it looks like this feature is here to stay. I think Facebook did the right thing in this case, they reserve the right to experiment and try new things, but also do right by their customers and are reasonable with business requests. Nice work FB 🙂

On Jun 24, 2013 Chris Thompson wrote:
It looks like they’ve changed course as Facebook removes photo comments. You might have seen 5 days ago that Facebook rolled out photo comments to pages. After that story next came notice the feature temporarily disappeared. Now it seems the feature has completely disappeared and will remain gone, at least for a little while.

How the old ...

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