Welcome speech
By Ilya Zakharau, Chief Executive Content Officer (CECO)
Welcome to the 4th edition of the BArszawa blog! April was a crazy month, considering the drastic weather changes and the number of activities in Warsaw.
First, our Telegram chat has reached a milestone of 200 members! We haven’t taken any proper actions to promote it, except for LinkedIn posts mentioning it and this particular blog. People learn about the chat from their colleagues and friends, so it is a native growth we are proud of.
Secondly, we have two(!) consecutive meetups in April! And that happened because of the wonderful Tatyana Pribolovets and Akveo. Thanks to them, we can hold our events for free in a WeWork location in the center of Warsaw. We genuinely appreciate your support of our dear Community!
!Important!
But before we proceed, I am asking you to spend a few minutes fulfilling a SURVEY about this blog. Your feedback is crucial for us to keep working on it!
Done it? Then let’s go!
The first event’s topic was “Product Manager and Business Analyst versus Data Science!” where we had two speakers:
Maryia Piskunova talked about a Product Manager’s experience, and Karyna Shynkarenka talked about a Business Analyst’s experience in Data science.
The best people in the town
The second event’s topic was “Tips for job search” from Pavel Kasenka, who shared his recent experience (successful one) in looking for a new job in a still volatile job market.
The amazing people and a green chair
Along with offline activities, Stepan Sazanovets and Taisa Taustales made a webinar for our friends from the IIBA Belarus Chapter about the “BA Development Plan”:
Announcements
We haven’t announced a new event for May yet, but it will come very soon. Don’t miss that in our Telegram chat.
Meanwhile, there are other BA events to consider:
Karl Wiegers: Essential Requirements Practices
⏰ 13 May 2024, online, 17:00 - 19:00 by Warsaw
🖇️ https://wearecommunity.io/events/karl-wiegers-essential-requirements-practices
This presentation identifies those 20 core practices and drills down into several of them. They can help project and product teams understand the business problem, engage the right participants, articulate effective solutions, communicate information among stakeholders, implement the right functionality in the right sequence, and adapt to change.
Collaboration and Creating Common Goals by Interacting Departments, IREB
⏰ 16 May 2024, online, 18:00 - 19:00 by Warsaw 🖇️ https://www.linkedin.com/events/collaborationandcreatingcommong7186389713581195264
The webinar will provide the tools and insights for effective collaboration between departments working on the same product, service, or solution.
IIBA Belarus Chapter Book Club
⏰ 28 May 2024, online, 18:00 - 19:30 by Warsaw
🖇️ https://www.linkedin.com/events/bookclub-indistractable7184219254534062080/comments/
In the upcoming reading session, we'll be exploring "Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life" by Nir Eyal. This insightful book delves into the challenges of modern-day distractions and offers practical strategies for regaining control of our attention and ultimately, our lives. Drawing from psychology, neuroscience, and personal experiences, Eyal provides valuable insights into why we get distracted and how we can overcome these distractions to focus on what truly matters.
Useful Materials
From Ilya
Aren’t you tired of Marty Cagan? I am definitely not
AI Product Management | Silicon Valley Product Group
Even though this article is titled “AI Product Management” (written by Marty Cagan and Marily Nika), it is relevant to everyone who builds AI-powered products.
The authors define the term “AI-powered” as products that apply AI technologies to create experiences that solve business or customer problems. They separate experience products (AI-powered) from platform products (AI infrastructure), with the latter focused on training Large Linguistic Models.
Then, you will find several risks to consider while developing an AI-powered product. While conducting requirements engineering, we should focus on mitigating those risks, or we get a “dead-by-arrival” product at the end.
About Composability
Currently, I am researching such topics as Composable Commerce or Composable Enterprise Model. In theory, it sounds pretty obvious: enterprises should be able to choose “best-of-breed” in-house or vendor products and effectively incorporate them into the organization fabric as a composable component. Composable means that those components can be easily re-configured or replaced at low cost to adapt to business needs quickly.
That sounds good on paper, but as business analysts, we know how hard it is to replace a piece of software, especially in large enterprises. It is a question of millions of dollars and years sometimes. Apparently, bright industry minds want to cut those costs and time in regard to flexibility.
Back in 2020, Gartner announced that “composable business modularity” is the future of enterprises. Nowadays, AI hype has overshadowed Composability, but that topic is still discussed, especially in the context of the MACH (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, Headless) architecture approach.
I will go into detail in an upcoming article, but if you are interested, there is an original article from 2013 that actually started that topic: https://adamalthus.com/blog/2013/04/04/the-composable-enterprise/
It gives a clear concept, and that will be used as a basis for my later posts on the topic.
A traditional minute of self-promotion
In April, I wrote two pieces about managing backlog dependencies:
The first one is theoretical, about the definition and types of dependencies: https://ilyazakharau.com/backlog-management-about-dependencies/
Second is a practical case about the dependency from one anonymous Product Owner: https://ilyazakharau.com/firefighting-depencies-case-study/
The next part of the “Requirements & API,” titled “Analysis,” is available. There, I talk about API from the requirements engineering and business analysis theory perspective: https://ilyazakharau.com/essays/requirements-api/3-analysis/
I also publish my stuff on Medium. So, if you are a Medium reader, I would appreciate your support there.
From Olga
In addition to BArszawa events, this month was filled with conferences, prompting me to share my key takeaways from them to inspire you to participate in such events more. While I wouldn't say that either of the conferences was perfect or completely captivating, there were definitely valuable lessons to be learned from both.
BA Excellence Conference by EPAM, online
The speeches I find insightful from the BA Excellence Conference by EPAM (Full agenda):
BA trends in Life Science - overview of life science domain. Video.
Create your own BA assistant with ChatGPT - As business analysts, we encounter numerous tasks where leveraging ChatGPT can be beneficial. For instance, it can assist in preparing for user interviews or structuring workshops. In this talk, the process of creating a customized BA assistant to suit your specific needs is shown. This motivated me to buy a premium account for ChatGPT 😃 Video.
BA as a Partner: Building an Analytics-Driven Company - This presentation will summarize how a business analyst can become a trusted partner to help their organization set smart goals for big data and analytics initiatives and deliver value through successful projects. Video
Interview with Midula Dey - Problem solving 101 - Why acknowledging self-doubt and imposter syndrome go hand-in-hand with problem-solving strategy and tactics for skills transformation and impact. Video.
IREB conference, offline, Warsaw
First of all, it was a huge pleasure to once again meet with many BArszawa-chat colleagues.
And now, to the speeches and things I found insightful:
QUALITY requirements – The often neglected requirements 🔥
Speaker: Peter Hruschka
Topic: While functional requirements are mastered in many software development projects the quality of quality requirements is often meager. Too many projects take qualities like usability or flexibility for granted, others mention security or maintainability, but stay on the buzzword level. But as we know: quality requirements are the architectural drivers. If you miss them, teams are in danger of developing wrong solutions – or system that are very hard to adapt as soon as these oversights are discovered.
Thoughts:
Never fight about categories, just say what you want to say. Use multi-tagging for filtering.
Open-source framework Q42 (https://quality.arc42.org/) could be used for finding practical examples of quality requirements.
Different aspects of one quality requirement may be important to different stakeholders, for example, „Flexibility":
User: Can it be adapted at runtime (e.g. layout)
Product Owner: Is it easy to extend?
Operation / DevOps: Is it flexible w.r.t. cloud providers or OS?
Management: Can it be used after the reorganization?
Requirements Elicitation: Bridging the Past to Shape Tomorrow
Speaker: Sylwia Kopczynska
Topic: Sylwia shared some lessons learned from research and industry and discussed potential directions for future works for more flexible and powerful requirements elicitation.
Thoughts:
Elicitation is one of the core requirements engineering activity. The goal is:
identify relevant requirements sources
develop new and innovative requirements
discover existing requirements from identified sources
Overlooked requirements sources:
Social media platforms
Stores with apps
Crowd-based RE
What is there?
What kind of feedback is there?
spam/ not spam
bug, feature request, service request etc.
privacy/security risks
ontology of words describing quality attributes
What is the sentiment? (Mood)
Book to read: Gray, Dave, Sunni Brown, and James Macanufo. „Gamestorming: A playbook for innovators, rulebreakers, and changemakers”.
Brainstorming
Dancing brainstorming (playing the music)
Individual preparation (note down their ideas before they are doing brainstorming)
Vision videos and get feedback from the users
Elevating the BA toolkit with Product Thinking: Wardley Maps
Speaker: Anna Kochanowska
Topic: In her talk, Anna explored the intersection between Business Analysis and Product Thinking, shedding light on practical applications, particularly utilizing a tool called Wardley Maps.
Thoughts:
Product thinking is doing now what your customers will need next.
Product offering + product stack = customer experience
Wardley Map (https://learnwardleymapping.com/) advantages:
Transparency and collaboration
Alignment and communication among stakeholders
Better decision-making, rich input for product management
Flexibility, easy to use
Works on multiple dimensions
Static vs dynamic
Informs strategic decisions by understanding dependencies and evolution paths
It doesn’t replace other tools, it’s a conceptual tool.
From Stepan
I’ve subscribed to Medium Digest recently, and among a vast number of not-so-cool materials, I find really interesting things sometimes. So, I'd like to share just a light, entertaining read with you (but still useful).
1st article is about how to provide non-obvious solutions.
Thinking Like An Uber Product Manager – Fare Enough :)
2nd one is about the “always actual” topic and how to create good user stories. Hope you enjoy it!
How to Write High-Quality User Story
The blog edition contributors:
Thank you for being with us,
BArszawa OrgTeam with Love!
