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Articles

Browse articles on product development, agile methodologies, portfolio management, and innovation strategy.

Capacity Models in Agile Development

A good capacity model is your secret weapon for improving your ability to deliver value rapidly. This paper describes how capacity models work and steps to develop your own.

Learning Loops and Customer Satisfaction

Many leaders view Net Promoter Score as the standard for measuring customer satisfaction, but by itself NPS is useless for deciding what ought to change to drive improvement. Read this paper to learn how to develop habits that drive improvement in customer outcomes.

TCGen Total Innovation U.S. Rank

6 most Innovative U.S. States in 2024: What Matters?

The topmost innovative states – Innovation Leaders, comprises 6 states (roughly the top 10%): California, Massachusetts, Washington, Colorado, Texas, and Utah. We identified those states that struggle the most.

Product Roadmaps

Product Portfolio Investment Map: Tying Product Strategy to Execution

A Product Portfolio Investment Map is a snapshot of product portfolio investments that shows the relative emphasis on various classes of new product development projects. Typically, these investments are grouped together according to the amount of risk each project assumes.

Product Offering Strategy

Product Offering: How to Create an Effective Strategy

A product offering is a group of features, services, or goods that work together to deliver a specific value proposition to the customer. A well-designed product offering can help a business stand out from its competitors, attract new customers, and retain existing ones.

Strategic Product Management

Strategic Product Management: The Key to Business Success

Strategic product management is crucial for developing a successful product. It involves defining the product’s vision and strategy, setting goals, developing the roadmap, planning the launch, and analyzing performance.

Consulting Deliverables: A Comprehensive Guide

Consultants provide tangible and intangible outcomes to clients through consulting deliverables. Some examples of consulting deliverables include reports, presentations, assessments, analyses, models, plans, designs, prototypes, and training materials.

New Product Consulting - Product Ideas to Life

New Product Consulting: Maximizing Your Product's Potential

New product consulting is a service that helps inventors, startups, and small businesses bring their product ideas to life. The process involves market research, product innovation and design, and strategies for effective product launch.

Five Habits That Can Accelerate Product Development

Better development habits let your team deliver more value, faster. This paper explores five key habits that the team at Agilent’s Software division adopted to double their productivity and build competitive advantage in the contested market for laboratory informatics.

Program Management

Program Management vs. Product Management

The titles of program manager and product manager sound similar, but they serve quite different functions in an organization. The skills and job title descriptions of these two professionals are distinct.

What is Product Development Strategy

Product Development Strategy

A product development strategy guides development of new products or changes to existing products to maximize sales.

Innovation Best Practices: Creating Better Innovations Faster

Innovation Best Practices: Creating Better Innovations Faster

Our clients often ask us how they can become more innovative. Some seem to believe that innovation appears as if by magic. Many believe that there is no process for innovation. We have identified three innovation best practices that are research-verified, an end-to-end series of steps that yield the best ideas.

The Sprint Planning Scorecard Increases Project Predictability

The Sprint Planning Scorecard Increases Project Predictability

Agile is not just for software anymore. Many companies that develop tangible products – be they hardware or mixed software/hardware systems – are applying techniques, like the sprint scoreboard borrowed from Agile. By combining Agile with traditional processes, they are accelerating programs and delivering winning products.

Agile Heat Map for Sprint Demos

Sprints and Demos: Twin Beacons of Accountability

Two of the most effective and beneficial of these practices are sprint demos. Powered by these twin aspects of Agile, development teams of all manner of products can increase accountability and make programs faster and more predictable.

Project Efficiency Chart

Project Efficiency: Getting More Done by Doing Less

Managers want to optimize their resources by loading them up and have them do more on the priority list to satisfy the executive suite and improve project efficiency. The optimum load is approximately 2 projects – one large and one small.

Lite Schedule Estimate Matrix

Execution: Quickly Estimating Accurate Project Schedules

The Lite Schedule Estimating Matrix is a tool that helps to estimate the amount of time a project will take in any given phase. It leverages past experience combined with the critical few, key drivers that impact a project’s schedule.

Why Retrospectives are a Waste of Time

Preparation is key to a winning retrospective. The most important goals in most programs are time to market, a winning feature set, and quality. The best method is to collect the events that impacted these factors using a timeline.

Project Boundaries Four Fields Map

Getting a Project Back on the Rails

Setting “project boundaries and conditions” at the time of a project’s approval is an effective way to create a “contract” between the management and project teams.

Apple

Agile Intelligence Consulting

Agile Intelligence Scaled Agile Consulting for Leaders Are you looking to transform your organization's software development practices to deliver value faster and more effectively? We have helped some

Product Development Process – 6 Development Steps

New Product Development Process

A new product development process is a series of stages to turn an idea into a product that satisfies customer needs.

What is an Agile Roles and Responsibilities Matrix? A Step-by-Step Guide

A responsibility assignment matrix is a technique for arranging agile team roles. It outlines the responsibilities of each team member by tagging them with one of four labels as follows: R for responsible, A for accountable, C for consulted, and I for informed (RACI). Project managers use RAM to guide scrum teams.

Agile Transformations and its Five Foundations Steps to Scaled & Distributed Agile Development

Agile Transformation

Learn about the Agile Transformation Process to smoothly transition from a traditional organization structure and embrace agile practices

Agile Books: Explore the 14 Must-Read Books

Unleash the power of Agile with our handpicked selection of 14 must-read books. Enhance your project management skills, master Scrum methodologies, and transform the way you work.

How to Use OKRs in Product Management

Understand Product Management OKRs, why they are important, and how to use them to streamline your organization’s process and workflow

Data Product Management: What it is and Why it’s Important

Data Product Management: What it is and Why it’s Important

Dive into the world of Data Product Management with TCGen. Explore its significance in today’s digital landscape, the roles of data product managers, and how it differs from traditional product management to drive business success.

Product Management Process

The Product Management Process Explained

Learn more about the product management process, its main stages, differentiation in terms of software and hardware, examples and much more in our guide.

Product management processes diagram

Product Owner vs Product Manager

Do you want to know more about the difference between product owners and managers? Learn more in our product owner vs product manager guide prepared by our team

Product Portfolio Management: Four Frameworks

Product Management Frameworks: A Complete Guide

Using product management frameworks is a way to dramatically improve product management and make your products a success. Read on to find the most powerful frameworks you could use to boost your business.

Product Development Metrics

Boost innovation with TCGen’s Product Development Metrics Consulting. Enhance leadership, make superior decisions, and drive remarkable growth today!

Product Development Metrics Tools

These Product Development Metrics Tools are based on real life examples, and have been tested in the field with clients on multiple engagements. We often are stuck when first getting started working on a complex issue, because we don’t know how to take the first step.

Circle Dot Chart

Product Development Process Tools

These Product Development Process Tools are based on real life examples, and have been tested in the field with clients on multiple engagements. We often are stuck when first getting started working on a complex issue, because we don’t know how to take the first step.

Product Development checklist

Product Development Checklist

The fastest way to destroy an Agile implementation is to let functional silos get in the way. Unfortunately, it happens all the time. And it happens because many companies underestimate the organizational implications of a successful Agile implementation.

Innovation: Are Two Systems Better Than One?

In too many companies, the front end of development remains fuzzy. The same companies that will micro-manage IT, or spend time simplifying a portion of their manufacturing operations, show little interest in improving the early stage innovation activities that drive future growth.

Attitude Influence Diagram: Eliminating Political Roadblocks

Attitude Influence Diagram: Eliminating Political Roadblocks

Have you ever had an excellent product concept derailed by internal politics? It is frustrating since good ideas that could benefit the company as well as the individuals involved are blocked for irrational causes. The Attitude Influence Diagram is one tool that helps to overcome political obstacles.

Risk Management Matrix

Risk Management Matrix: Anticipating and Mitigating Risk

You can’t take the risk out of invention and no project is completely risk-free. But you can reduce the risk, even in the most innovative programs. How? By anticipating it. The Risk Management Matrix is an elegant way to anticipate, manage, and mitigate product development risks.

Controlling agile

How to “Control” an Agile Development Project

So-called “Waterfall” or “Phase-Gate” product development methodologies often give management the illusion that they are under control of the project, while they are actually just meddling and slowing it down.

Circle Dot Chart: Clarifying Responsibilities

Circle Dot Chart: Clarifying Responsibilities

Sorting out who does what on a project is pretty basic. Clear tasks with clear responsibilities and deadlines is Project Management 101. But how many projects have you managed where it was unclear who was responsible for a deliverable until it turned into a mess? The Circle Dot Chart addresses this issue.

Event Timeline

Visualizing the Unexpected

Project post mortems can be an excellent tool for learning from mistakes and implementing process and decision-making improvements.

Half-Life Diagram

Forecasting the Future

The Improvement Forecaster consists of an equation, and a graphical plot of expected improvement over time. It uses estimated degrees of technical and organizational complexity, and based on prior programs, estimates a rate of improvement.

Product Radar Chart

The Product Radar Chart: Making Smart Product Tradeoffs

The Product Radar Chart offers a way to evaluate and communicate the myriad factors that go into product and portfolio decisions by graphing the key dimensions of a product or concept and comparing them to alternatives.

Comparative Funding Model

Comparative Funding Models: Funding Innovation Programs

Most businesses today are looking to take advantage of innovation to drive revenue growth, but they lack methods to fund the R&D expense necessary to support expansion. Use this handy visualization tool to fund innovation programs.

Risk Management Matrix

How to Manage Risk Proactively

Innovation entails many kinds of risk: technical, market, or risks related to external events. Product developers can’t avoid it, but they can do more to mitigate risks.

Product Vision - Between Strategy & Roadmaps

Product Vision - Between Strategy & Roadmaps

Have you ever wondered how to create a great product vision? Let’s show you. Start with some examples to get your reference frame properly set. Then look at some of the formats that might work best for you.

Apple Logo

Empowering Teams Through Metrics at Apple

Four times Apple tried and failed to adopt a consistent product development process. We established a target metric with the aim of seeding the changes within the organization so that they took root.

Change Impact Matrix

Change Impact Matrix: Understanding the Consequences of Changes

The Change Impact Matrix is a descriptive tool that details the scope of the changes that everyone involved in a project will face. The matrix is useful for presenting the project context to upper management when discussing the project status, schedule, and progress to plan.

Attitude Influence Diagram

Make Meetings the Best Use of Your Time (Instead of a Waste of Your Time)!

We’ve all experienced those mind-numbing meetings – there are a lot of people in the room, and many issues to resolve – but at the end of the meeting, little has been accomplished – what a waste of time and energy! One of the biggest factors driving inefficient meetings is organizational politics.

Social Community Matrix: Getting the Most Out of Social Communities

Social Community Matrix: Getting the Most Out of Social Communities

Many of our clients are using virtual communities to communicate and collaborate with outside partners. Managed communities enable you to share ideas and present the best proposals to the leadership team. Here’s a tool that helps select the best type of community for your needs.

Optical modulator Project Risk spider diagram

Anticipating Risks: The Risk Mind Map

The Risk Mind Map enables a team to create a comprehensive risk profile. It allows management to anticipate where risks might arise and to prepare to meet these challenges more effectively.

Small Bar Graph

Agile Burndown Graphs

In agile development, the team goes through the whole build/integrate/test cycle with the goal of solving the greatest number of user stories or requirements per build. Tracking the number of user stories completed per build combines many best practices into one easy-to-use system.

Nine-step Initiative Plan

Jump Starting Teams

New programs spin up every day, but most teams get off to a bad start. In a rush to get going, they forego a few simple steps that would help position their programs for success.