Jira is a great tool to manage your roadmap and your backlog. One of the main advantages of Jira is that it has great default issue types and lets you create any other types you may need to make the most of your project. Default issue types in Jira Epics Epics are goals or initiatives…
You want to manage your Product Roadmap with Jira? This is a good place to start learning what you need to make the most out of it. I will specifically go through the Roadmap view and Epics. The Product Roadmap view In each project there is a section in the left navigation bar called Roadmap.…
In this post I share with you 12 deliverables that will make your freelance project look more professional. What are project deliverables for freelance professionals? It’s common to think that project deliverables are the output of your work in a project, however, I think of project deliverables as the collection of documents, designs, reports or…
The reason why I write a post about the agile manifesto for beginners, even though I am not a beginner anymore, is that this is the post I wish I had been told of back when I first heard of Agile. Table Of ContentsWhat is the agile manifesto and why was it writtenWhat is the…
Gartner's Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies anticipated 5 key digital trends to watch in 2021 and beyond. Based on these trends by Gartner, the recent acquisitions and, of course, all the changes COVID19 brought to our lives last year - from a growing concern about sanitation to more awareness about public health and a mass…
Make your chatbot UX great again with these 4 tips brought to you by me, Cristina Santamarina, and the soon to be ex-POTUS. These tips, and the images that go with each tip, have been with me since I presented the first version of this slide at Tarugoconf in 2017. I presented in different speaking…
Product Management lessons are hidden everywhere, and also in movies and TV shows. If you are a product manager like me, a lot of the situations in the videos below will remind you of some situations from your real professional life. The Pentagon wars: Scope creep You've seen it: as you iterate on an MVP…
Miro and Confluence can work wonders alone, and now their combination is even more powerful than it used to be. Let me tell you about this cool new integration and how to get started! What are Miro and Confluence? Confluence is made by the great people at Atlassian, who also make Jira. Product and Project…
MVP, does it ring the bell? It stands for Minimum Viable Product and if you work in the startup world I bet you've heard about them a few times. If you don't know what I am talking about, you may want to take a look at the Lean Startup first! How can an MVP help…
One of the key tasks of an engineering manager is to identify capacity building opportunities. My Team Capacity Matrix for Capacity Building planning can help you: Know what skills are strongest in the teamHighlight capacities that need improvementIdentify members of the team that can lead training sessionsIdentify members of the team that need handholding The…
If you want to manage your Product Backlog with Jira, this is a good place to start learning what you need to make the most out of it. I will specifically go through the Product Backlog view, the list and detail view, Prioritization and Dependencies Mapping. The Product Backlog view in Jira In each project…
Google has finally brought visual flow building to Dialogflow. Before I dive deep I wanted to share these very exciting news with you and give you a sneak peak to what's new in conversational interfaces tools. Still in Beta, Dialogflow CX comes with more advanced features like testing, and improvements in other features released over…
I want to get practical and share with you the different available Product Backlog tools we can use to manage and share our plans. In a previous post I made an introduction to the definition and benefits of Product Backlogs, which may be useful if you need a little more context before we get started.…
A Product Backlog can answer questions like: "What are we going to work on next?" "Are we set to start working on feature ABC?" "Did you know about this bug XYZ?". This tool will be of great help getting this information to the rest of your team. What is the Product Backlog? The Product Backlog…
This is a collection of thoughts about the future of conversational interfaces. It will eventually become a longer blog post and I predict, amongst these other predictions, that it will be an interesting read in a few years. It is hard to make predictions in this environment, but I trust you will take these as…
Conversational interfaces like chatbots and voice apps are in the frontline of the global coronavirus response. In another post of my blog I spoke about maps, dashboards and APIs used in the fight agains coronavirus. Today I want to talk about the use of chatbots in the coronavirus response. I have advocated for chatbots in…
The COVID pandemic increased the general public's interest in public health and health sciences, and pushed a new wave of e-health products that aimed to identify symptoms early and limit transmission through contact tracing and followup. Learning about viruses and understanding how they work is vital if you want to build solutions against COVID. Hundreds…
This pandemic is fought with medical care, information and data. As already discussed, data can be very useful to fight disease and a lot of technology initiatives are already dedicating efforts to fight coronavirus through databases, dashboards, chatbots, 3D printing of medical supplies, work and delivery groups... In this crisis governments are fully aware of…
On Jan 30, 2020, WHO declared the current novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) epidemic a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. On March 11th the WHO raised the alert and declared it a pandemic. It's the first time the WHO has called an outbreak a pandemic since the H1N1 "swine flu" in 2009. However, all…
This is a collection of resources for inspiration, design patterns and data sets you can use to stay informed or as you work on your own data project around COVID-19. Dashboards & Maps While dashboards have their disadvantages (my ex-colleague Lucy can convince you, this is her blog post) they are very appreciated by a…
The World Health Organisation has officially declared the Coronavirus a pandemia. My previous experience working as a technology consultant in public health has led me to be increasingly interested in disease and, specifically, in transmission processes and in the power of data to predict, prevent and control outbreaks, as well as in the power of…
Humans can leverage the power of data to combat epidemics such as the coronavirus outbreak that has put the world in siege during the first quarter of 2020. Epidemiology Epidemiology is the branch of medicine which deals with the incidence, distribution, and possible control of diseases and other factors relating to health. It plays a…
I try to use visual elements like icons and stock images in my presentations to convey messages without the need for words whenever I make a presentation for work, teaching or speaking at events. I like the words I speak to be most of the words you perceive while I am speaking. My talks are…
Vogue publishes that SoHo House, the Club network, is getting into coworking, opening a work plan that starts at 400$ in NYC and planning to offer coworking plans in their other locations - including Berlin and Barcelona - over the next months. Coworking started as a low-end alternative to traditional Business Centres, the space dominated…
Conversational interfaces integrated in all sorts of devices are changing the way we interact with technology and are in the roadmaps of a lot of different companies. Amazon and Google are investing a lot of resources to bring their smart assistants to everyday objects, and so are manufacturers of a lot of different products. A…
Defining conversational interfaces is a great point to start from if you are considering starting a project or even a career in conversational interfaces. A lot has been spoken about conversational interfaces. As we already saw in this blog, conversational interfaces are not only super popular and present in our culture through things like movies…
The history of conversational interfaces starts a long time ago. They are slowly but steadily reaching homes all around the world. Amazon had sold 100 million Alexa devices by January 2019 and the numbers only rose through the year. For iPhone users this kind of interaction was not new. iOS has Siri since 2011 and…
Movies shape the way we look at the world. Science fiction has undeniable affected our capacity to be admired by technology. When we think of conversational interfaces and AI our expectations are high compared with the technology and products available to us as consumers. This is a list of 7 movies that have affected the…
Retail has been deeply impacted by the digital transformation of companies. Ecommerce has changed the way consumers shop, and the world of retail will never be the same. With a growing demand from customers to comfortably shop from their own homes, some brands have taken a fresh look at this pattern and have suggested an…
When people think of digital transformation too often they only think of websites and database and social network profiles. Digital transformation, however, is way more than just that and affects businesses and organizations in deep ways that ideally lead to the discovery of new business models. These transformations and business models ultimately shape our society…
Google Translate, the go-to reference when it comes to translating words online, relies on artificial intelligence to suggest translations and lets users suggest improved translations for words and sentences. According to Wikipedia, Google Translate helps over 500 million people translate more than 100 billion words - every day. In this post, I explain what's behind…
If you like fashion there's nothing like movies about fashion designers and publications to enjoy customs and learn more about this fascinating world. This post is a collection of 10 movies you need to watch. Movie descriptions are spoiler-free and come from IMBD. Link is in the movie title. The Director: An Evolution in Three…
Machine learning is a field of computer science and artificial that tries to answer a question already formulated in 1959: How can computers learn to solve problems without being explicitly programmed? A computer program is said to learn from experience E with respect to some class of tasks T and performance measure P if its…
In order to boost the figures about women participation in the technology industry some organizations have started campaigns that tokenize women in the industry and pay little favour to the #womenintech movement. This post explains what this tokenism is about and gives 7 examples of things organizations can do about it. Wikipedia says: Tokenism is the…
After the app, what’s next? Messenger apps’ ubiquity, their low use of data and their little need for local storage make chatbots an interesting platform to explore as the first step in this change of paradigma.
I wrote a guest post for The Power of Coworking, a blog by Alex at the coworking space SHHARED in Germany. In the post I gave tips for coworking space managers to expand their community into remote workers living rooms. This post is a summary of the most important thoughts and includes a link to…
Conversational interfaces continue to slowly but steady take over their share of the market. I've been hoping for a full blooming to happen soon for a while already, but I continue to enjoy the continuous discovery and learning that comes with pioneering. The team at botanalytics.co asked to interview me after a call as part…
What would our lives be without music? This post is a rarity in a blog that talks mainly about business, technology and reivindications about women in technology. Music, friends, makes the world go around. A lot of the businesses that serve us on a daily basis were first thought of and built over music. These…
Brainstorming sessions supported by simple things like whiteboards, post-its, or static notes, allows for faster changes, more divergent thinking, and more creativity. Teams and individuals all over the world use brainstorming to find creative solutions. In this post I explain some of the ways in which you can structure your brainstorming to make the most…
I discovered chatbots in 2016 and immediately fell in love with them. I was immediately interested in understanding the UX implications they would have and how we could, as product managers, define the ultimate characteristics of a chatbot that looked and sounded empathic. In this post I suggest a few design tips and tricks for…
You may be transitioning out of Google Drive to use another service or you may be leaving a project where you worked - the truth is that in any of these cases manually saving files or, worse yet, simply letting them go, is a no no. In this post I explain how to export your…
For years I have been using Google Docs as my main text processing tool. Just like many of you I started using Microsoft Word in high school and upgraded to Pages when I started using a Mac some years later. These are great test processors but lack two very important features: collaboration and version control.…
Productivity can be enhanced with the right apps. Do more in less time with these 7 tools for productivity! The Noun Project In the last year I am writing a fair share of proposals and specifications for software apps as part of my job at eHealth Africa. Text is good for detail, but nothing beats…
If you are a regular reader you may have noticed that my site recently went through some much-needed polishing. A different template, different colors, a nice logo to accompany my name... The ones to blame are my friends and go-to designers Markos and Esther. In this post, I explain the creative process and show you…
When managing projects or planning events or social media calendars I often find myself counting days between two events or calculating when x days from now will have passed. The usual solution has been to grab a calendar and use my finger to count days forward or backwards, or to count some days like this…
‘Work Life Balance’ returns over 280 million results in Google, most of them associated to remote workers. While it’s important to have time for both, this is especially difficult when working on the move for nomad workers and business travellers. I have had my share of work travel and the four tips below have helped…
Comes from this post 2. The Value Proposition Canvas by Peter Thomson Business and emotions Peter J Thomson modified Alex Osterwalder’s Value Proposition Canvas, as he felt it didn't take into consideration the emotions of customers and the marketing aspect present in every business development process. Thomson’s Value Proposition Canvas helps decide where to start…
The business model canvas template is a one-pager that showcases the most important details of your business model. In this post I want to give you different templates and advice to fill it in. It is widely used at startups and hackathons to iterate on business models on paper. Each of the sections of the…
A year ago this time we were probably sitting in my living room, eating snacks and giving shape to feelgut. The summer before Laura had told me about her idea of building a social platform for people with rare diseases who were searching for alternative treatments, people with chronic diseases who felt the need of…
The Kanban board is a tool used to track progress in projects. In a Kanban board, the tasks needed to complete the project move along a progression of states. Project managers can use it assign work to teams and team members, who will use it to track the progress of development, letting everyone do things…
