KBP Media

Just-in-time resources for product people

Kent J. McDonald

Kent McDonald

Kent is a writer and product manager who helps product people deliver powerful internal products. He has IT and product development experience in a variety of industries including financial services, health insurance, nonprofit, and automotive. Kent practices his craft as Content Curator at Agile Alliance and shares his ideas and experiences at KBP.media.  When not writing or product managing, Kent is his family’s #ubersherpa, listens to jazz and podcasts (but not necessarily podcasts about jazz), and collects national parks.

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Story Splitting

Story splitting is the act of examining a large backlog item and splitting it into smaller backlog items that provide value and can be delivered in a short time frame.
You can consider story splitting to be a planning technique that helps you organize your backlog into manageable chunks. You can also think of it as an analysis technique that helps you understand a particular backlog item through the act of splitting it into smaller, valuable backlog items.

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Example Mapping

Example Mapping is a backlog refinement technique that helps you structure your team’s conversation around a backlog item. The conversation focuses on drawing out all of the relevant acceptance criteria (or rules), related scenarios and pertinent questions associated with the backlog item you are discussing.

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Usability Testing

Usability testing is a way to test how intuitive the design, user flows and content is in your product, app or website. Usability testing consists of asking real people who are similar to potential users to perform various tasks on your product. You can use the information gained from this exercise to identify opportunities for improvement in your product’s design, user flows and content.