insights-tools
- A Journey of 1000 Miles is Still 1000 Miles Long
It’s easy to confuse actual progress with intentions to make progress. Why point out the obvious? I’ve just come out of another agile conversation where prospective clients confused “we want to build better software faster” with “we hope that some new processes will instantly catch us up on years of slipped deadlines and missing features...
- VersionOne Endorses Enthiosys Roadmapping
I’m writing this brief post from the Agile2010 where earlier this morning I got a demo of the new VersionOne roadmapping functionality from Bob Vincent, one of the product managers from VersionOne. I’m quite encouraged by what I saw. Full disclaimer: VersionOne has been a client of Enthiosys. We’ve helped them prioritize their product backlog with Innovation Games® online...
- Magical Thinking and the Zero-Sum Roadmap
{a post by Rich Mironov} Recent conversations at several clients highlight an often-repeated set of magical thinking: beliefs by internal clients that development resources are infinite, and beliefs by product managers that prioritization can convince anyone otherwise. Both are wrong, but seductive...
- Metrics and More Metrics
{A post by Rich Mironov} Continuing a discussion that was raised in Tom Grant’s recent conference call with Saeed Khan, they (we) made a distinction between metrics about products that Product Managers use to monitor the world, and metrics about Product Managers for promotions and salary reviews...
- Market Facts, Judgment, Fallibility and Ownership (or how I learned to stop worrying and love market uncertainty)
Every few weeks, I find myself itching to play the product management “heavy.” This is the moment when I want to yell ”...because I’m the product manager and I said so!” Not an ideal strategy for PMs or parents. Here’s a more productive approach, with input from many other PMs...
- Certification is Discrimination
With all of the intense discussions about certifications in the Agile Community, I thought it would be good to share an article that James Bach and I wrote in 1999 when Ed Yourdon challenged us to take a stand. This was in the days just before Y2K, and there was a lot of concern...
- Is Agility Making You Less Innovative?
It has now happened four times in the last 9 months: A Senior Executive of a company called us up because they were unhappy with their Agile (typically Scrum) practices. It has taken a bit of time to understand the pattern, but I think we’ve got it: Agility is making some companies less innovative. Let’s explore some of the reasons why this can happen and how to fix it...
- Enthiosys in 2010
Although we’re nearly done with Q1 2010 I thought it was high time to share with our clients and the world the very exciting new journey we have started this year with some changes to the team, vision and structure of Enthiosys...
- Site Licenses and Other Real-World Intrusions
The Enthiosys team just finished up a major pricing exercise with a start-up in the enterprise software space: tuning up their prices, improving their upgrade model, and looking at alternative pricing metrics (i.e. what to meter when quantifying the customer’s usage). A great opportunity to match quantitative models against actual customer behaviors...
- What we’re all about…
I’m proud to be speaking at the Business of Software conference on Nov 11, 2009 on how Innovation Games® and collaborative play can create breakthrough products and services. I’m proud because I’ve long admired Joel Spolsky’s work...
- Ad Hoc Collaboration Is NOT Instantaneous Collaboration
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about many of the blogs and demos that I’ve seen over the years about ad hoc/unstructured collaboration. I’ve had to, because as we’ve moved from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 to the Collaborative Web, we’re being bombarded by an increasing number of these concept videos—and some pretty interesting, early stage product offerings...
- Intellectual Asset Management Magazine: CIPO Innovation Games
At the June 2009 meeting of the Chief Intellectual Property Officer (CIPO) Manifesto Working Group, Luke Hohmann led an extended series of Innovation Games to help the group identify/clarify their oles, challenges, relationships to other business functions, and the ideal CIPO in the year 2015...
- Market Problems or Just (Bad) Ideas You Want To Build?
Our partner Pragmatic Marketing recently released an updated version of the celebrated Product Marketing Framework. The change that I feel is most significant is the movement of Market Problems to the top left position in the framework—the most important spot (for English readers)...
- Agile 2009: Product Management/Ownership and Business Agility
Now that I’m unpacked from Agile 2009 in Chicago, I wanted to share a few highlights from the conference: [1] Product Manager/Product Owner track. Enthiosys was proud to chair a new track this year for product manager/product owner topics and speakers, co-chaired by Steve Johnson of Pragmatic Marketing with able help from Scott Sehlhorst, Laureen Knudsen and Jennifer Fawcett...
- New White Paper on Business Agility
Scott Gilbert and the Enthiosys team have written a white paper called “Business Agility: Harness the Power of What’s Possible” and distributed copies of at Agile 2009. We’re now asking for feedback from the broader product management, product owner and agile communities...
- EOL from the Customer’s POV
As seasoned product managers, most of us eventually have to phase out old versions and completely eliminate old products. This is called End of Life (EOL) or End of Service (EOS), and is important weed-clearing...
- 6 Lessons for Non-Dev Executives at Agile Software Companies
In many conversations over the last few months, I’ve see executive teams grappling with the positive effects of agile software development on their non-development processes and organizations...
- Living in an Agile World: The Role of Product Management When Development Goes Agile
This Kindle e-book is written jointly by Pragmatic Marketing’s Steve Johnson and Enthiosys’ Luke Hohmann and Rich Mironov. It discusses the role of product manager in an Agile development environment. No matter how agile Development is, you’ll never build a successful product if the work being done isn’t aligned to the company strategy and market needs...
- You Want Actionable, Not Final
We’ve just launched Innovation Games online at www.innovationgames.com. YEAH. It has been a labor of love. And while our fledgling software needs so many improvements in so many dimensions, we’re still amazed at the results our games can produce. One of the design principles that we used in creating innovationgames...
- Profitably Pairing Software and Professional Services
Wearing our software product management hats, it’s easy to think that all problems should be solved with software. (To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.) Software PMs need to be looking for opportunities to combine professional services with software – because services can be highly profitable, meet customer needs more quickly, and market-test ideas for future products...
- Power Curves and User Generated Content
We know that UGC systems have a power curve—few users generate a lot of content. I suspect that the many simplist ideation submission systems that are currently flooding the market are creating a similar power curve of processing the ideas. That’s likely to be really dangerous...
- Really Bad is MUCH Better than Nothing and Really Great Isn’t Much Better than Bad
Product Managers, Agile or otherwise, are asked to create a fair number of documents. Even when we’ve replaced our “Big” MRDs with vision Statements, Roadmaps, and Backlogs, most of us are still expected to clearly document: Who we’re serving (e.g., target markets, market segments) Why they care (e.g., benefits of product often expressed in ROI) Why we care (e.g...
- Top Five Product Management Books
Many years ago I ran the Education group at ObjectSpace. I had an amazing group of instructors working for me, many of whom have gone on to very successful careers as developers, consultants, and educators. I’m grateful for all that I learned, and continue to learn, from that amazing crew...
- New Product, Upgrade Existing Product, or End-of-Life? Yes. Maybe.
One common misconception about roadmaps is that they’re all about the future. This perception is fortified by the use of roadmapping formats, including one of the formats that we prefer here at Enthiosys, that are indeed focused on the future...
- Cost of A Wrong Decision
What is the cost of a decision about features and priorities? Consider this from the point of view of an agile product manager planning major releases or a portfolio team looking for incremental revenue. We’ve built a very simple tool below to help estimate the cost of an epic...