Product Management System &

Processes
Friday 11 March, 2016

Dublin Institute of Technology

Post-Graduate Diploma in
Product Management
 Product Management Diploma
Programme
Strategic
Strategy & Business Case &
Negotiation &
Business Models Pricing Applied
Communication
Learning

Innovation & Product

Technology Management Applied Project Best
Management System & Process Practice
iploma Modules

Strategic
Market & Structured
Customer
Customer Analysis Methodology
Management

Leadership & Practical domain

Structure Project
Personal
Management Expertise
Development
Scott
Sehlhorst

2015: DIT, Sabre AS, Courion, AllClear ID

2016: DIT, AllClear ID, POSC-USA

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Schedule

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What Level of Problem?

Andy Polaine - http://www.slideshare.net/apolaine/design-to-the-power-of-ten/55

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Connecting Vision with Execution

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How Do You Get There?
What is our strategy? What do we build today?

There’s always lots of white space

between idea and execution.
- Ben Thompson, stratechery

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How Do You Get There?
Five Minutes on your own
Try working backwards –
“Why are we building this
Connect the dots / today?”
describe how you get
from strategy to delivery? Try working forwards –
“How do we achieve that
goal?”

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Sources of Requirements
Market insight & customer analysis
Understanding the problems customers are willing to
pay to solve
Sets the context for prioritizing the external importance
of what your team will do
Strategy
Defines your company’s goals, and your company’s goals
for your product
Sets the context for prioritizing the internal importance
of what your team will do

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Product Strategy
Be market driven
Have an outside-in bias
You are not your customer
Work in the context of a market model
Be intentional about who your product is for
Be agile in how you manage your product
Your market changes – adapt to it
Your competitors change – respond to & pre-empt them
Your understanding grows – apply it

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Outside-In
Innovation is what you get when you have a
valuable invention.

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Outside-In vs. Inside Out
Outside-In: There’s a problem
Will people pay to solve it?
Can we help people solve it?
Can we get people to pay us?

Inside-Out: We have a tool

What problem can we solve?
Who has that problem?
Will they pay us to solve it?

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VR Headset Features
What you would like your VR
headset to have/do (5 min)

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Goal Driven Development

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Impact Mapping
Goal
• Who makes it happen?
• What activity are they doing to make it happen?
• How do they measure success of the activity?
• How does (should) our product change the activity?
• What is the impact of our product on their activity?
• How do they measure the success of our product?

• What other activities of this person affect the goal?...

• Who else could impact the success of the goal?
• What are these other people doing?…

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Impact Mapping

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Impact Mapping

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Impact Mapping

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Impact Mapping

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Impact Mapping

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Impact Mapping

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Exercise
VR Headset Requirements
On your own…
Identify what you would like to
do with your device (5 min)

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Exercise
VR Headset Requirements
At your table…
 Identify what you would like to do with your device (5 min)
(1) Converge
Select a requirement, identify the underlying goal(s)
(5 min)

(2) Diverge
Select a goal, identify other ways to achieve it
(5 min)

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Problems -> Solutions -> Requirements
Understanding of the importance of
problems to be solved.

Understanding relative value of

solutions we can create.

Sequencing the creation of solutions to

the problems.
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Satisficing or Unsatisfying?

Steve Johnson
http://under10consulting.com

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Problems: Kano Analysis
You’ve already covered But maybe not this…
this…

Indifference Realistic more is better

Must be/ must not be
Customer delight
More is better

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Outside-In vs. Inside Out

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If You Build It, No One Cares

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Drive-Thru Coffee Without a Lid

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Flat Tire Which Repairs Itself

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More Pixels!

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More Pixels, Gradually Less Relevant

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Double What the Eye Can See Might
Be Good Enough

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When Will Improvement Drive Profits?

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Disruption Redefines the Space

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Problem Classification - Summary

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Example from each table
Pick a more-is-better problem that
you identified
1. Show how solutions map to the
curve.
2. What would make it disruptive?
3. What would make it table
stakes?
4. Are there increments of
improvement that make sense?

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Markets Evolve, Things Change

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Coffee

There’s some truth to this…

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Market Problems
An outside-in view of which problems are
important to solve

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Ansoff Matrix

http://www.foswiki.org/pub/Sandbox/SimiWiki/Strategies_for_diversification.pdf

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Ansoff Matrix

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Customer-Centric Market Model

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Market Segments

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Customers

Quick level-set question

Are most folks already
comfortable with the
distinction between buyer
and user personas?

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Persona – UX Template

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Persona – Marketing Template

http://www.ux-lady.com

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Three Types of Personas
1. UX – help me know the best design the
product for a given user
2. (Product) Marketing – help me know the best
way to sell the product to a given buyer
3. Product Management – help me know which
problems the product should be used to
solve

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Approaching Persona Development
Keeping a perspective Built on research
Primary research
Prospect interviews
Customer interviews
Win/Loss analysis
Survey data
Instrumentation of product
Ethnography
Secondary research
Published research
Competitor white papers
Infer from related research

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Personas: Where / Why / How

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Personas: Where / Why / How

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Personas: Where / Why / How

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Personas: Where / Why / How

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Personas: Where / Why / How

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Getting to Insights

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Product Management Personas

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Personas Represent Differences
How important is it to you
that the vacuum is…

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Different Personas Care Differently

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Structured Requirements

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Overhead of Documentation

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Level of Detail Captured

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Overhead vs. Level of Detail

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Overhead vs. Domain Expertise

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Domain Expertise

What communication
challenges do you face?

Would a different format help?

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Structure of a User Story
The card is not the story.

The card is a commitment

to have a conversation.

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Structure of a User Story

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Exercise
VR Headset Requirements
At your table…
 Pick one of your user goals
1. Identify an activity for that goal
2. Write the user story for that
activity
3. Identify how success is
measured for the activity
4. Write the acceptance criteria

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Workshop (12h – 13h)
From market to requirements

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Develop Outside-In Requirements
Corporate Goal*
Provide a cutting-edge, best-in-class learning
environment for executive education.
Strategy (and design)
Include an online environment/experience for students
as one of the provided / leveraged resources.
…Plus more stuff that is outside the scope of this exercise

Product
The online environment / tools / services / apps

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The Process
For each 20 minute activity,
use 5 minutes on your own, then 15 as a group

1. Identify the users/customers (you, aka Tina) [0 min]

2. Identify the relevant goals [20 min]
3. Build out an impact map for a goal [20 min]
1. What activities help achieve the goal?
2. How do you measure success at the activity?
3. How will/should the product help?
4. Write user story and acceptance criteria [20 min]

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 15min +
15 min
What are Tina’s Goals?
Develop an impact map for Tina

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Impact Map to User Story

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 15min +
15 min
What Are the User Stories Needed?
1. Identify the users/customers (you) [0 min]
2. Identify the relevant goals [20 min]
3. Build out the impact map for them [20 min]
1. What activities help achieve the goals?
2. How do they measure success at the activity?
3. How will/should the product help?
4. Write user story and acceptance criteria [20 min]
Switch Back to Main Flow
Lunch

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Whole Product Classification

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Levitt & Kano

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Whole Product Model
Mapping of VR Headset
Capabilities
(5 minutes solo)

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Whole Product Model
Mapping of VR Headset
Capabilities
(5 minutes solo)
(5 minutes group)

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A Value Nuance – Skill Trees

The differentiator has no

value to the customer
when the table stakes
feature is not present

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Why Build [X]?
What is the most important thing to build (now),
to help solve a market problem.
Why choose that problem?
For whom are you solving that problem?
Why choose that persona?
How effective are the alternative solutions to
that problem, for whomever you are solving it?

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Personas in Context
Each persona has some
characteristics (rows)
Each persona has a
context in which their
actions (goals) make sense
(columns)

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Assay of User Goal Space

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Persona With Goals

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Relative Problem Importance
By persona & context

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Kano Analysis of Read Anywhere
1. Below The Bar - User must be seated, and
have power and internet connectivity (at
the time of reading) in order to use the
device.
2. na
3. Usable but Very Annoying – User can read
while standing without being connected to
power or the internet.
4. Not Quite Happy, but Whatever - User
must be indoors, with reasonable lighting
and temperature.
5. Meh - User can read while riding on the
bus or in a car.
6. OK, but Nothing Special- User can read in
outdoor lighting.
7. Good - User can read pretty much
anywhere except really noisy, jarring, and /
or low-light environments.
8. na
9. Wow! - User can read anywhere that the
user would want to read.

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Relative Capability Effectiveness
By competitive product
for read anywhere capability

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Relative Capability Effectiveness
By problem & competitive product

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Business Strategy Drivers
For assessing importance of each persona

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Potential Importance of Each Persona

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Importance of Each Persona
Given a particular business strategy

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Strength of Each Competitor
Tells you how “good” each capability needs to
be to beat each competitor – given a particular
strategy

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Coffee (or Tea, for the civilized)

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Bowman Clock – Framing Strategy
Who are you trying to be as a company?
Who are your competitors trying to be?

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Porter’s original theory
Firms compete with one of 3 basic strategies
1. Be the low-price leader – be the cheapest
2. Be the high-value leader – be the best
3. Differentiated solution for subset of market –
own a niche
Bowman (and Faulkner)
Expanded to 8 viable ways
to frame a competitive
stance
The struggle between value
and cost (from the
customer’s point of view)
yields four interesting long
term approaches.
Every company is in one of
the 8 boxes
Some companies are trying
to reposition into a different
box
Low price competition
How do you win?
Lowest price gets you revenue.
Marketing spend gets you
revenue.
Do you win with market share
(suck the oxygen out of the
market, everyone leaves, you
become entrenched)
Where do you invest?
Short term – achieve
profitability @ low price -> lower
costs / achieve scale
Longer term – move to higher
price -> increase profits by
increasing prices
High Price competition
How do you win?
Differentiate. Market
share is gained one deal at
a time. How do you make
your product the right one
for this deal?
Low price, low value
Race to the bottom
Win with scale + razor thin
margins
Porter says no more than 2
competitors can survive here

Escape path – move up

While sustaining low price
position (e.g. while maintaining
low costs)
Increase the value you provide
levitt whole product – what are
differentiators? Focus on them
Kano analysis – how much do you
need to improve your solution to
problem X?
High Price, Low Value
The death corner
You lose business to lower price – not better, but
at least it costs less
You lose business to higher value – at this price, it
better be good

Escape paths – move left OR move up (but don’t

try and do both at the same time – focus!)
Move left
Prioritization / theme -> cost reductions,
investments to achieve scale, focus on jettisoning
high cost (to provide) services
Use levitt model & kano to make sure you
completely (and only) solve the table stakes
problems, sufficiently to win a price-war
Move up
Prioritization / thematic roadmap focus is on
capabilities that appeal to a specific persona /
market segment / niche
“Do everything Seth Godin would tell you to do”
Low Price, High Value
Porter argued that this corner
doesn’t exist. Bowman’s argument –
technology makes it possible (for
costs to be low enough relative to
value, for this approach to be viable /
sustainable / profitable)

Escape path
Leverage the high-value
(differentiated offering) into higher
pricing
Focus on niche, where ‘more value’ is
narrowly defined, and realizable
Economies of Scale becomes
economies of Scope
High Price, High Value
“Finding true love is not a funnel
optimization problem”. [April
Dunford]
Key here is to acknowledge that
you grow market share one deal
at a time. The only way to win
the next deal is to be the best
option for that specific customer.
Which product would you
choose?
Something that is perfect for you
(even if inadequate for someone
else)
Something that is adequate for
you, and adequate for everyone
else too
Innovation / Uncertainty Framework
Portfolio of projects
An intentional mix of investments
Process suitability

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Portfolio of Projects
Applies to a single product*

For each customer problem…

How much uncertainty is there…
…About the market viability of a solution approach?
…About your team’s ability to implement?

*You can use this approach for any portfolio of investments

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Understand Investments vs. Risk

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Strategy Aligns w/ Risk Profile

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2011 Ecommerce Roadmap (v1)

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2011 Ecommerce Roadmap (v2)

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Some of Your Projects
From each table…
Pick a “high” priority item in each of your current
products

Where is it
in the layout?

What can we do
to reduce risk?

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Will any Process Work?

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Will any Process Work?

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Product Roadmaps
External
Customers, sales, partners, (competitors)
Internal
Communication outside the team
Setting context & direction for the team

In Practice
Might need two versions of the roadmap

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Roadmaps Are High Level
Embody the company’s Organize and prioritize at
vision and strategy a strategic level
For which customers
are we solving what
problem,
in what (rough)
timeframe?

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Users and Problems
Problems \ Users Joan Jim Jane
Problem 1 x x
Problem 2 x x
Problem 3 x x x
Problem 4 x
Problem 5 x

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Customer Focus is One Approach

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Build out examples
General Case
Pick one customer group – be excellent for them, then expand to adjacent
customer groups.
a. Be excellent at solving problem A for customer M
b. Be excellent at solving problem B for customer M
c. Be excellent at solving problems A & B for customer N
d. …
Pick one problem – solve it for everyone, then expand to associated problems.
a. Be adequate at solving problem A for everyone
b. Be excellent at solving problem A for everyone
c. Be adequate at solving problem B for everyone
d. …

Google Fiber
Average speeds everywhere, then get faster
Gigabit speeds in one place, then add places

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Two Approaches
Prioritize by person Prioritize by problem

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Roadmap by Person

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Roadmap by Person
2012 Q2
MVP for Jane
2012 Q3
Ideal for Jane
2012 Q4
Great for Joan too
2013
Now supporting John

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Roadmap by Problem

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Roadmap by Problem
2012 Q2
MVP for Jane & Joan
2012 Q3
Better for Jane & Joan
2012 Q4
MVP for John
Even better for Jane & Joan
2013
Better still, for everyone
2014
Ideal for everyone

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By Person or By Problem?
By Person is Better By Problem is Better
Exploring new market New product for existing
Penetrating existing market customers
Fast-moving competition No fast-moving
Disruptive products competition
Incremental improvements

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From Problems to Capabilities
Persona’s problem space Product’s needed
capabilities

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Converting Through Kano

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Backlog Derived From Goals

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Another Customer Centric View

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Boring, But Traditional View

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 Anything We Set Aside, to Cover Now?
Anything to Make Sure We Address Tomorrow?

Have a Great Evening,

See You Tomorrow @ 08h.45

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Backup Slides

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Full Structure of a User Story

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