insights-tools
- Social Animals in Lone Wolf Roles
Part of P-Camp’s excitement was gathering so many product managers together in person – twice last year’s attendees – for sharing and informal networking. Putting physical faces to our online personas. This prompts some thoughts about product managers being socially isolated within their technical organizations...
- Agile CMMi or Agile Competing Competencies
In the early 1990’s, when I was at the Univ of Michigan, I had the good fortune to be selected to write the initial software that helped Bob Quinn and his team (including Dan Dennison) in the development of their Competing Values Model for assessing organizational effectiveness. The results of their research culminated in their book Becoming a Master Manager: A Competency Framework...
- Images Needed!
I need free images that meet the following criteria: Large Images: Resolution – 593 X 585 Background – White Borders – None Type – gif/ jpg Small Images (Apple, Orange, Banana, Circles, Dots, Squares, Dogs, Cats, Starts, Cows, animals, etc): Resolution – 25 X 25 Background – transparent Borders – None Type – gif Please send me images! Thanks! Luke
- Market problems are still THE problem — even when you’re Agile!
On Feb 18, 2009 I was the lead facilitator for a market research event run by Borland and Enthiosys on how Agile teams identify, express, organize, prioritize, and validate requirements in Agile projects.Quite naturally, the event was based on Innovation Games, which created a seriously fun and inviting context to explore these topics...
- Adding Outbound to Cross-Functional Teams
Lately, there’s been lots of discussion about whether Agile is strictly a software development methodology, without major impact on the outbound parts of a software company, or whether it’s driving broad changes in how companies deliver value to their markets...
- Agile Sales and Marketing
In an earlier post I complained about the relatively myopic focus of proposals submitted to the Agile Product Management stage for the 2009 Agile Conference. I’m excited to report that Teicko Huber of www.focus2grow.com has responded to my challenge, posting a talk on how Scrum-influenced Agile can improve Sales and Marketing. I invite you to look at this talk, and comment...
- Important Lessons in Pairing – From a Designer’s Perspective
As part of our blossoming partnership with cooper, I had the good fortune to sit in one one full day of cooper’s Interaction Design Practicum. Kim Goodwin (recent author of _Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-Centered Products and Services) was the instructor. Throughout the class, she emphasized the importance of pairing in design...
- How To Sound Smart (But Be Really Naive) About Dramatic Changes in Technology
Adam Bullied posted an apparently naïve question on his blog, inviting readers to take simplistic views of agile product management as identical to traditional product management, or as a completely different animal. Lots of folks piled on, creating a patchwork of comments and opinions that don’t address the interesting question of how product manage has evolved under Agile...
- Product Management Through The Eyes of a Product Owner
I’ve finally finished adding two submissions to the 2009 Agile Alliance conference. My first submission is my very popular “Prioritizing for Profit” talk on how a product manager should approach the prioritization of a backlog based on backlog items that drive profit and avoid ROI prioritization schemes...
- Cutter Consortium: “The Message Driven Warehouse”
“The Message Driven Warehouse: A New Architectural Model for BI Systems,” written by Enthiosys’ Ken Collier and Dan O’Leary, was published by Cutter Consortium. In this Executive Report, Ken Collier and Dan O’Leary introduce an enhanced data warehousing architecture designed to enable developers to respond quickly to new requirements and to adapt easily to change...
- Special 2-Day Innovation Games Class at Cooper U, Mar 30/31, 2009
I’m very pleased to announce that Enthiosys is teaming up with Cooper to teach a special, two-day Innovation Games® class at Cooper U in San Francisco. I’m very honored – and excited – to be working with Alan Cooper and his team of talented designers. For those of you who attended Agile 2008, you know that Alan really “rocked the house” with his presentation...
- Chefs and Agile Restauranteurs
As more of our clients have moved to agile software development, we’ve seen a growing need for business agility: getting non-engineering functions involved earlier and more collaboratively, so that companies deliver better revenue results as well as better software. Let’s make this more concrete by mapping it to the restaurant business...
- Aligning Compensation is Harder Than Aligning Goals
One of the well-known virtues of Agile development is the focus on frequently delivering valuable, working software to our customers. In practice, this results in the establishment of a variety of well-defined goals at all layers of the planning flame...
- I’m Vigilance, the superhero who…
I’m proud that Enthiosys has recently joined the Qualitative Research Consultants Association (QRCA). I’ve been selected for a “new member” interview. They sent me a list of pretty interesting questions, which they’ll post on their web site...
- How Well Can You Predict The Future?
It’s been a very tough quarter for economic forecasters, quota-carrying sales teams and CEOs. The sudden downturn even caught GE’s legendary planners by surprise. If you’re an executive at a technology company, you may already have started an FY09 planning process to re-examine staffing, product investments and revenue...
GlobalLogic: Using Games to Shape Products
We had two days of fun filled and very effective sessions with Luke Hohmann on ‘Innovation Games’ .You could read more about these games at http://innovationgames.com/the-games/ Initially, I was a little apprehensive about the sessions as I was involved in preparing for these sessions and there was quite some stuff including stickers to be collected...
- Roadmaps and Feature Relationships
Our approach to developing agile product roadmaps emphasizes the evolution of products. Sometimes, this is best captured through a time-centric format, such as the format I first described in my book Beyond Software Architecture and described by Scott Gilbert and Jeff Brantley in their recent webinar...
- Understanding the Opportunities of Buy-Side Economics
As CEOs of our products, we product managers have a lot to do. Traditionally, this has included “build-versus-buy” decisions. The debate often hinged on whether technical tasks were “core” or just “context”...
- We Roadmap and So Should You
{Scott Gilbert, Enthiosys President} Here at Enthiosys World Headquarters, it’s time to start working on our 2009 corporate goals and plans. Like most companies we have a good idea of who we are and what we want to become, in other words “a vision”. Like most companies we have to pursue that vision one day, one week, month, quarter and year at a time...
- QRCA: “Selling Qualitative Market Research to Agile Software Developers” by Luke Hohmann
Luke Hohmann’s article in the Winter 2008 edition of QRCA Views (published by the Qualitative Research Consultants Association) is called “Tips on Selling Qualitative Market Research to Agile Software Developers.” “The hottest topic in the software-development community, Agile software development is a new way of producing higher-quality software in record time...
- “Art of Product Management” now available on Amazon
Published in November 2008, The Art of Product Management: Lessons from a Silicon Valley Innovator collects Rich Mironov’s most popular Product Bytes columns from 2002-2008 with forewords by Prof Henry Chesbrough and David Strom. You can now order it on Amazon! The Art of Product Management takes us inside the head of a product management thought leader...
- Nov-14-08: Scott Gilbert and Jeff Brantley webinar on “Agile Roadmapping”
What: “Agile Roadmapping” – Scott Gilbert, President of Enthiosys & Jeff Brantley, Director, of Product Management for Borland) When: Friday, November 14th This webinar is part of a joint Pragmatic/Enthiosys series on Agile Product Management. Our roadmapping tools, templates and approach are described here...
- Nov-7-08: Luke Hohmann webinar on “Prioritizing Your Backlog for Profit”
What: “Prioritizing for Profit” with Luke Hohmann, CEO, Enthiosys. When: Friday, November 7th, 2008 This event was part of a joint webinar series with Pragmatic Marketing on Agile Product Management. Agile product managers (and their Agile development teams) are told to prioritize backlogs based on ROI. In practice, this isn’t possible...
- Roadmap Templates
Whether your team is Agile or Waterfall, roadmaps are critical to your product planning. You can read more about our roadmapping service and strategy here...
- Distribute the team? Distribute the pain!
We’re seeing an increasing number of clients with distributed Agile development teams. Although this runs somewhat counter to simplistic views of Agile development practices, which focus on co-located teams, it is a much more realistic reflection of actual global development practices. Global, agile teams are here to stay...