Thoughts on the How

Before I begin, I’ll issue a warning: What you are about to read is not advisable, though it is a first-hand account.  (Also, I wish to credit Scott Sehlhorst for inspiring my commentary by his comment about this topic in this post about agile prioritization.)

I’m currently running a large development project which is transitioning at the 2/3 mark from waterfall to agile.

Now that I have that out of the way, a little background.  The project was defined in terms of discrete requirements, originally tied together with a few key workflows and wireframes, and involves an n-tier architecture with a number of moving parts.  Though much of the underlying architecture was completed, we weren’t clear enough about the workflows and stories and the project was not producing tangible results fast enough.  So, while we recognize we should have started with agile, the company hadn’t adopted the agile methodology at inception.  To achieve our goal of better predictability and periodic peer review of the software, after it became possible in the corporate environment, we moved to agile.

Note that in the first half of the project, we erred on the side of providing requirements that stopped at the “what,” rather than providing the team enough about the “how.”  The move to agile has exposed that we weren’t providing enough context around each requirement (story) to enable the development team to build the product.  In this case, the complexity of the project and an unfortunate number of unknowns has made it useful for product management to collaborate with user experience well before presenting user stories to the development team, as advocated by others, rather than attempting to involve UX on an “as-needed” basis for each story.  In prior attempts to provide only the agile user story in “As a ___, I need ___ so ____” format, it quickly became apparent that the story wasn’t nearly enough.  We had to deliver the agile user story with the workflow steps (including interaction design) — only that seemed to eliminate enough uncertainty to proceed.

From a higher level, there’s another lesson here that operating under both paradigms has exposed.  It was quickly clear that for a complex system, providing the complete user stories and supporting material (including workflow steps, interaction design and wireframes) enables undesrstanding and fast action.   Though it was in some ways coincidental that we had wireframes before our sprints kicked off, it already appears to have sped things up significantly.

Hopefully the ramp-up will expand as we continue down this path, and we’ll reach the finish line quicker than we might have otherwise.

Startups and Product Management

As I spend more time in startup-heavy Austin, I think more about the role of product managers in startup companies.  In most cases, that role is implicit–there is no “product manager,” per se, but rather a CEO and/or CTO who have a vision for a product and who chair a personal quest to bring it to market.  There is plenty of risk here for those who understand product management and have delivered products to market.

The fact is that as demands placed upon a startup company mount, the focus of the CEO begins to split to operational and technical issues.  If someone is not dedicated to the product itself, it seems very easy — to cite but one example — to experience feature creep where people think additional functions “can’t hurt,” while they’re really not focused on the specific target market and whether or not that target market will actually use the feature being considered.

In a recent On Product Management post and the related comments, several of my peers argue for hiring experienced product management early in the life of a startup to avoid missing the target and delivering a product that isn’t a winner.  I hereby add my “ditto” to those opinions.

ProductPotluck Austin

Attendees at each of the ProductCamp “unconference” events held in Austin have provided feedback reqeusting more frequent events for the product management and product marketing communities.  In response, the folks behind ProductCamp have unveiled a smaller version of the unconference, calling it ProductPotluck Austin.  Before you make any plans, be sure to “bring ideas — not food.“

The agenda includes networking and 2 presentations, to be voted upon by the attendees.  For the first meeting on October 21, two topics have been selected: Marketing and Product Strategy.  Participants are asked to submit topics, and registered attendees can vote upon the sessions offered between October 12 and October 16.  On the 21st, the participants will vote from among the top 4 vote-getters to determine the two topics to be presented that evening.  Much like ProductCamp, this format engenders a bit of good-natured competition and brings out better presentations.

We hope that this periodic mini-unconference between the biannual ProductCamps can help advance the product management and product marketing community in Central Texas.

Currently, 54 people are signed up out of a maximum 150.  Hope to see you there!

NOTE: Please see Paul Young’s more extensive write-up of the event.

Marketing and Product Strat

Is innovation really that simple?

I’m reading an interesting book by Denis Hauptly called Something Really New, which purports to boil innovation down to 3 simple steps:

1) What is your product used for?
2) What are the steps that compose that task, and can any of them be removed?
3) What is the next thing the cusotmer will do after using your product?

Hauptly points out in the book that there are two types of innovation, essentially incremental and wholesale, and this type of three-step process is more applicable to incremental innovations.  The small (incremental) innovaiton is not necessarily less valuable to a company, and it is more likely to be teachable.  By honing one’s focus on the purpose of products and the specific steps of the tasks they enable, attention is being focused on workflows and on looking for opportunities to optimize.

How does one reach life-changing innovation?  Is it the same as incremental, but just a better target for optimization?  Or is it something existential that may only happen to people in a hightened state of mind or with higher skills?  I suppose if I truly knew the answer, I’d be a more successful innovator!  That said, while I think creativity and skill plays a great part in it, innovation is probably not as likely if one doesn’t focus attention on the steps required to accomplish tasks, and the tasks which come before and after a task–which is what this book helps to do.  For communication of that mindset, I find it valuable.

Internal systems

One of the takeaways I’m finding in Bill Jensen’s book Simplicity is a reaction to the effect that information overload has on company productivity.  As there is more and more information to process to do one’s job, it becomes ever more important for a company to provide tools that not only provide access to information, but which help interpret the information in the sense of analytics.  So how does this manifest for a large company aiming to produce streamlined products for the marketplace, that will address (and solve well) a specific problem?

As a product manager with a multinational corporation, I find that (at least at my company in my specific division/subsidiary) there’s a contrast between the streamlined solutions we’re being asked to produce, and the cumbersome internal systems we use to collect and analyze the information we use to design such products.  The systems we’re building are “push,” but the systems we use internally are “pull.”   Some of this may be due to our company’s implementation of off-the-shelf requirements management and project management tools, but the net result is that the company does not make it easier to easily understand the decisions we need to make, much less make them.

I suspect we are not nearly the only ones.

One of the products I’m developing now is a service which can run client-server or on the web, in order to maximize the base of customers to whom we can provide a solution.  I’m finding that questions about–and design of–the internal management components to be used by company support representatives are getting short-changed due to the pressure to meet release targets.  This is certainly not unique to this one product, and the support angle hasn’t been ignored, but at the same time the support team’s “use cases” have not been considered with nearly as much diligence and interaction design as the product itself.   So in one sense, the sub-optimal experience product managers have with requirements tools is being propagated to the experience support reps will have with service management. 

Something I need to reiterate within my organization.

Simplicity

I started reading a book about Simplicity titled Simplicity: The New competitive Advantage by Bill Jensen, and immediately one of the author’s assertions struck a chord.  One of the book’s hypotheses (simplified) is that knowledge workers spend too much time figuring out what to do, leading primarily to diminished productivity and frustration.  For large companies, much of this is laid at the feet of upper management, who may craft a concise strategy at the top but fail to disseminate that strategy appropriately within the organization.

In the case of product companies, whose effectiveness is related to how well they can develop new products and bring them to market, this is one function of product management.  Product managers are responsible with becoming intimately familiar with the market’s needs in order to identify opportunities to build solutions the market will pay for, and documenting those problems and needs as requirements.  (as opposed to building something we think is cool, and then struggling to find buyers)

With this role as market spokesperson, the product manager guides designers to craft a solution that will satisfy the needs so completely that buyers will be lining up to pay.  In some organizations, the product manager serves as the designer as well.  Either way, when that design is delivered to development, the vision, goals and solution must be clear enough that the developers can craft an accurate plan and execute without getting mired in confusion and endless analysis paralysis.  Certainly the feasibility of the design must be validated before the project team is ankle-deep, but much of the programmer-as-knowledge-worker’s confusion can be alleviated by a clear vision of the solution.

Note: Modern design patterns tell us the product should also be simple and focused, but that is a topic for another post.

Jensen cites his research to assert that the 4 primary causes of confusion among knowledge workers are:

1. lack of integration of change
2. unclear goals and objectives
3. ineffective communication
4. knowledge management experience

Certainly the integration of change is a big problem during merger and acquisition activity, forcing disparate systems to be blended.  Knowledge management is the problem of finding knowledge already present within the organization.  But the other two–unclear goals and ineffective communication–can be addressed within a software development organization by product management.

ProductCamp Austin – Summer 2009 – recap

I’m writing to share my recap of ProductCamp Austin.  As expected, the event was fantastic – over 300 product management and marketing professionals sharing their knowledge and tips.  I met some great folks, and wish I could’ve met more.  The only negative was the day wasn’t long enough!  But that leaves us wanting for next time, and leaves open a bunch of unfinished conversations.

My own cryptic notes from several sessions are published on Slideshare for whatever value they may provide you.  They include audience comments and are not in a narrative, but are rather cryptic and choppy.  They’re free; leave me alone.  Along with that, a few slide decks and better notes by others that I’ve found shared so far.  Note, more may be collected on the PCA website over time.

Meanwhile, I must simply reiterate that the ProductCamp experience is as much about the things you can learn as the people you meet.  If you are interested in product management, agile, product marketing or even user experience, make it a date next time ProductCamp rolls into your town.

Session notes etc
Personas to Production / Paul Sherman
Employee to Entrepreneur / Kevin Koym
Down and Dirty Marketing Ideas / Jonas Lamis (notes)
Buyer Personas Justify Bigger Online Marketing Budgets / Brian Massey
Podcasting Means Business / Fred Castaneda
Agile and PM / Growth Acceleration Partners
10 Ways to Predict an Impending Launch Disaster / Dave Daniels @ Pragmatic (best presenter)

Notes by ID University

Session notes etc

Personas to Production / Paul Sherman

Employee to Entrepreneur / Kevin Koym (mindmap)

Prove and Disprove your Ideas / Jonas Lamis (notes)

Buyer Personas Justify Bigger Online Marketing Budgets / Brian Massey

Podcasting Means Business / Fred Castaneda

Agile and PM / Growth Acceleration Partners

10 Ways to Predict an Impending Launch Disaster / Dave Daniels @ Pragmatic (best presenter)

Others’ notes

ID University

Session 1:

Jonas @ TechRanch

Prove and Disprove your ideas

Industrial revolution was an anomaly, bc of the cost of information. Companies will have 0-10 employees, rather than 1000s.

Getting paid;

• what you do = advertising

  • keywords–>correct audience–>testing mesages–>browsers to buyers.

  • Landing page with 3 plans, and buy button – lead to a ‘not live yet’ page with signup and a reward for signing up.

  • “nothing happens til somebody sells something.”

• what you know = thought leadership

  • Passion/Knowledge/Domain => sweet spot is all 3 shared area.

  • Perceived value by most readers: Least = your co’s products and services. Most = industry trends.

  • Find the best 5 blogs in your subject area, and ask to write a guest post.

  • Google rankings: video is 1^st, audio 2^nd, blogs, then website.

• who you are

Colleen & SmartWoman

Thought Leadership for Consultancy

Vicki: I increased my business by doubling my price.

Colleen: offer classes to mid size orgs with staff of Pms;

team with marketing firms to bring in PM/mktg expertise.

Time tracking and estimation is key to running your own business.

Commoditization of templates: set of deiverables.

Smart: My biz Skyrocketed after $ back guarantee at end of project. Only 2% do this.

Many of my customers I’ve never met in person.

I do gap analysis repeatedly. Commoditize that; FAQ=product. 1-2 months or less –> this is a proposal for a bigger project.

I frequently fire clients if i learn they are nuts, when the gap analysis is completed.

Polite but insistent with slow payers. Pay dates @ milestones. Smart does 50% up front.

Be able to identify your ideal co. In 1-3 sentences.

How important is your experience? Put yourself in ideal client’s shoes. If they need a specific subject area, it’s more important.

• • Bag the Elephant = book about bagging large companies as clients.

  • Results with companies and clients = your “experience,” where it’s NOT your time in an industry. Testimonials also help.

    Smart: Position yourself so you don’t NEED to know the industry. Process > domain knowledge.

  • Roger: Domain knowledge is important for strategy-interested clients.

  • Positioning: Product expert of type (SaaS) in an area (Medical) or Process (prod mgt know-how).

  • Strategy–>higher in the org., CEOish.

  • First: Interview prospective cust, lay out the probs.

    • Roger: They don’t do it, and do NOT hire us to do it.

    • They want right side of pragmatic grid (tactics) not left: they believe they already have good strategy.

  • Idea: sell a win/loss to sales manager, then develop a strategic proposal.

Smart: I have increased my biz in this economy. Relationships are my #1 job.

Rate Examples:

1. 1. 1. $150-225 hr

      2. monthly

      3. Colleen: Doubled my hourly rate as an employee, added a bit more, and calculated for a job. $10k engagement, cust said “fine.” I should have asked for more.

Agile PM and Requirements

Roger on Pragmatic: Practical Product Management, + req’s that work, by Barbara or Steve only. Did not help me monetize my business, but helped me greatly to be a better product manager.

Typically, 1 yr to 18 months to successfully adopt agile.

Agile requires more intensity and more mature company.

Balance between documentation and conversation.

Challenge if marketing, customer talk, sales and training are also demanding time.

Rigorous prioritization; If you don’t prioritize, the dev team will do so, and will not use yours. Riskiest or biggest payoff should come first.

Daily accountability achieved by The daily scrum, where you hear each person say what they did.

UI may be scaffolding

QA gets shafted frequently.

“Wagile” = agile sprints + a testing cycle afterwards. This often leads up to real agile, as an intermediate step.

Roger: most do functional decomposition. You lose site of the user benefit.

Make progressively more demanding exit criteria, using versioned user stories.

Quality must be built in from day 1, not at the end.

Sell a company on reducing config time on large scale implementation, without knowing look and feel; that allows input on the implementation of solution itself. Sell the “realtime feedback” of agile.

When and how for UI? As soon as possible. Change to UI usually means big underlying changes.

Roger: frame metrics without interactoin. Ace criteria = x seconds to achieve x. Also design persona to show why this is important.

Roger on PO: Product owner = product manager + architect + UI/UX.

Growth Accel Partners.

Pragmatic

see above

Your status + value goe up with knowledge about the market, NOT the product.

Who does CEO go to about market data? VP of Sales, because they are known to have people in the market. Fallacy is that these people just know recent deals, NOT what’s actually happening in the market.

Knowing the buyer and knowing how they buy makes you a rock star.

Don’t promise the future and kill today’s sale, or you lose the trust of Sales. Make sure those you speak with are not in the pipeline, so you don’t sabotage a sale and they may not tell you everything. Open ended problem discovery vs. Validation of ______.

Colleen – Time Management

with Tom Evans from Lucrum Marketing

Paul Y: How to avoid things that provide less value or don’t move the revenue needle?

Sometimes, be an asshole and push back on meetings.

Identify schedule in 4 categories, color coded

green = add value

blue = other work

yellow = rest/exercise

pink = errands

“The Time Breakthrough.” The Strategic Coach, by Dan Sullivan.

Buffer day = prep for focus/free days. Use this as delegate/calls/etc.

Focus day = midnight to midnight, 80% or more must be focused target value add.

Free day = required for rejuvenation; must do No work.

Focus day on Friday because no-one pays attention.

Zero inbox.

Minimize context switching.

Tom Evans:

MS Framework team/model/role clusters (c) 2004.

Program management + UI + Testing are all non-PM funcitons that product managers get stuck with.

Blackblot strategic PM

Become a market expert.

Mrd= prob space

mkt opp = biz case

plan + guide market docs (mkt plan, positioning)

goal: market req doc, not even product req doc.

Maxims on last slide

disconnect on off days

multitasking is a myth

block productive time

deleted/delegated = completed

manage your time in Project

gannt to show how adding a task pushes others back.

Randypausch.com

Daniel Pink: Whole new Mind (creativity)

Babuta: Zen to Done (Simplified GTD)

Covey; spend time in Important/Not urgent Quadrant

closing suggestions

• some 2 hour sessions to get us more depth on some topics

• response back from volunteering requests

• know highest rated sessions from last year

• vote online the night before

• hashtags for each room / effective use of Twitter during the day

• printed schedule

• mroe roundtables

• some 30 minute sessions to give us access to more topics

• small group discussions over lunch

• More time between sessions for networking

• longer day, 9-5, to get in more sessions

• Timekeeper in each room

• Informal follow-up in 2 weeks

• repeat selected events from sessions that overlap

• take time to introduce newbies to folks

• post schedule changes online

• post meetings for partnering; link up and share interests

• tracks; beginner and advanced (from Tweetcamp)

• Badges for volunteers

• stickers for volunteers/rookies/etc

• Label sessions novice/intermediate/advanced

• feedback online sessions and overall

• bios of speakers before sessions

Best session = John / PM & PM?

Best speaker = Dave Daniels

Olga re info interview

heard about your work, want to learn about your background. Let me buy you lunch.

ProductCamp Austin Summer 2009

Others have summarized ProductCamp better than I; for that, I’ll cite the driving force behind ProductCamp Austin, Paul Young:

ProductCamp, the free unconference for marketing and product management, is teaming with the McCombs School of Business to return to Austin for its Summer edition! ProductCamp is a must-go event for marketing and product management professionals. ProductCamp is a free, collaborative, gathering for interesting, smart people to network and learn from one another. ProductCamps have been held in Silicon Valley, Austin, Boston, New York City, Toronto, Atlanta, with more in the planning stages. This is Austin’s third ProductCamp, and will be one of the largest in the country. If you are in Austin, or can get here, ProductCamp will be well worth your time.

Paul covers the concept of “uncoference” quite nicely, but suffice it to say that the important piece is that this event is free, and put on by those who attend.  Everyone attending is asked to participate somehow, whether it be by manning the welcome table, coordinating sessions, coordinating the venue, etc.   In that way, everyone gains and everyone gives, and the group has a common experience to share afterwards.  As Paul’s been known to say, it should start conversations, not end them.  I personally participated in the last event by helping to secure note-takers and videographers for the sessions; this time, I’ve taken on social media by running the Twitter and Facebook presence of the event.

So far, and this is only 9 days after the official public launch, there are 267 people signed up to attend/participate.  In the spring, the event was capped at 250 and saw true attendance around 150-160 if I remember correctly.  Also to compare, the inaugural event in Atlanta (my previous home, and a metro area 4 times as large) that just occurred in June was attended by a little under 200.  New York’s event only captured about 150.  Clearly Austin’s community is large and active, no surprise to those familiar with the area.

If you haven’t registered yet, get to it!

Contact info

I have to admit, this post rang true for me. When I go to find contact information for a company, and I run across a contact form that keeps the operator masked behind a cloak of anonymity, I typically find myself annoyed. This post helps to explain why.

Sorry this one’s a bit short, but I thought the article is worth a read.

Can Palm come back from the Dead?

By now, everyone has heard about the hype of Spring 2009, the Palm Pre. The release is finally confirmed to be taking place on June 6. Many are asking, can the device possibly live up to the glowing reviews?

Let’s look at this from a slightly different angle–I think it’ll be fascinating either way. Look at the amount of brand publicity Palm has gotten out of this device! For a company that became a household name ten years ago with the Palm Pilot line of products, it’s been a rough ten years watching that name fade in its influence until it was practically swallowed whole by Apple when the iPhone was released. I think this is one of the contributing factors to why the Pre is getting so much pub, but there are a couple of others:

- people who think Apple needs a solid competitor in the consumer space
- perceived quality of the WebOS “card” UI
- need for a new “story” to fill the pages of technology blogs
- Palm loyalists who want to get away from Windows Mobile
- everyone loves an underdog

Yes, I’m stretching here. I’m not exactly sure what is really motivating all this attention. I really think it’s blog filler–I’ve had two Palm devices over my lifetime and own one now (the 800w), which sadly I’m contractually committed to until June 2010, but I’m definitely a late adopter. I’m still waiting to see if that whole “computer” thing is going to take off.

One thing Palm is actually doing right is involving developers early, to jump start the “app store” concept. Palm recruited a bunch of developers to have a look at the OS and got impressive feedback. Developers are already organizing BarCamp-like PreDevCamp events to collectively organize and learn to develop for the new OS. So part of the seed behind the hype is winning over the geek squad.

Still, this won’t succeed if it only wins over the technical folks. Simply put, this product must win over the consumer–and that battle starts June 6. has already begun.