Team: Having worked with me since 2004, first as a consultant, then as President of Enthiosys, starting in 2006, Scott Gilbert has been invaluable in growing Enthiosys into the leading Agile Product Management Consulting firm it is today.  After years of helping other companies and teams understand and succeed with Agile, he is going back into a senior product management role where he can practice what he’s been preaching, test out new ideas and move the Agile PM tribe forward.  This fits with the Enthiosys’ core value of being able to speak from experience, not just quote ideas and theories created by others.

Rich Mironov also excelled during his tenure as CMO for the firm. Rich was instrumental in honing our service offerings into a cohesive and coordinated set of engagements, improving our messaging, and providing terrific services to our clients. Rich is returning to his solo consulting practice, where he’ll continue to write Product Bytes, champion agile product management causes and work with Enthiosys on selected projects. On a personal note, I was proud to have Enthiosys sponsor the production and publication of Rich’s book The Art of Product Management. Rich continues to provide product management leadership for the upcoming Product Camp Silicon Valley and the product management stage at Agile 2010 – both of which were started and nurtured through Enthiosys. It is especially gratifying to see the amazing and rapid growth of Product Camps around the world.

I sincerely thank Scott and Rich for all of the help they have provided me and the firm during their time with the company and I wish them both the best in their future endeavors.

I welcome Jason Tanner to the staff as President. Jason spent part of 2008 and all of 2009 in the field serving two of our largest customers helping them transition to Agile practices. Jason lived the transition from a ‘traditional’ product manager to an Agile Product Manager and has leveraged his experiences into quality service to our clients. Jason has embraced Innovation Games® in creative ways to increase collaboration for clients and other groups from the Product Camp RTP to the DFW Scrum Users Group.

Vision: While we will maintain a focus on Agile Product Management, this year we plan to expand our scope to Agile product delivery. In 2009, our customers asked us for more than product management consulting. They desired more complete services to build and start exceptional teams with great product managers and terrific coaches. They asked for assistance with development and testing practices with longer time horizons for continuous improvement. As a result, we broadened our network of senior consultants to provide a targeted combination of services to delight our customers. This subtle and important evolution will continue this year. Our offerings will grow with a new selection of services, training courses and content to address customer needs. You should also expect to see us continue to leverage our partners to increase our ability to deliver a full suite of services. Our vision also include increasing the emphasis on our training offerings.

Structure: We launched online Innovation Games® last year and grew the games team to continue enhancing the platform while increasing adoption of the games. Along the way, we started to notice that our clients and other consultants were using the games to solve a variety of serious problems in areas of sales management & execution and corporate strategy—in themselves novel and exciting uses of the games. To better position ourselves to capture these emerging growth opportunities, this year we will spin out The Innovation Games® Company as a separate business entity.

In many ways, these changes reflect the natural evolution and growth of our organization, including the natural growth of Innovation Games®. We’re very excited about 2010, and look forward to serving you as you create breakthrough products and services.

In fast-moving environments, product development teams can get lost in the gulf that often exists between strategic roadmaps, technical roadmaps and detailed project workplans. A good communication structure bridges this gulf and ensures that corporate strategy feeds technical roadmaps and detailed work plans.

In this interactive session, Enthiosys President Jason Tanner will provide a methodology for developing a comprehensive, collaborative product roadmap that ties together elements of strategy, product, technology, marketing and resources into a complete picture that can easily be communicated internally and externally. The session includes an opportunity for attendees to begin creating their own roadmap, leveraging the Enthiosys-proven approach to planning success.

Join Luke Hohmann for our two-day Innovation Games Practitioner course, designed for people who want to integrate Innovation Games® into their market research, Voice of the Customer, Product Development, and Customer Collaboration initiatives. This course will prepare you to plan, play, and post-process both in-person and online games through a unique “learning by doing” case study approach.

Join Luke Hohmann and Mitch Lacey for the Certified Scrum Product Owner Course, a two-day class which introduces the concepts of agile product management using the Scrum methodology. Why does this matter? The 2003 Standish Chaos study showed that 43% of all IT projects had a cost overrun. Furhter, 52% of all projects failed to meet objectives, 66% failed and 82% were delivered late. It’s no wonder our customers are unhappy! This course will provide you the tools, techniuqes and most importantly, the understanding needed to be an effecitve Scrum Product Owner. Students will learn tried & true methods for building, managing and prioritizing the Product Backlog and ways to build a product roadmap for release planning. Successful participants will be listed as Certified Scrum Product Owners on the Scrum Alliance website.

Confluence 2010 will feature a novel and ground-breaking methodology called Innovation Games® to help attendees better understand their planning processes and provide a springboard for improving them. Based on deep principles of cognitive psychology and organizational behavior, Innovation Games® have been considered as the leading kind of “serious games” that help organizations tackle complex problems. This event is sponsored by GlobalLogic and will be facilitated by Innovation Games founder, Luke Hohmann.

What: P-Camp 2010, the world’s largest Product Camp/Product Management Unconference
Where: Yahoo! Headquarters, Sunnyvale, CA
When: March 13, 2010, 8AM to 4PM

P-Camp event website

Registration page

Session proposals and voting

Postings and photos from last year’s event are here.

Innovation Games® training conducted by Luke Hohmann
You’ll learn what each game will accomplish, why it works, and how to play it with customers. Then, Hohmann shows how to integrate the results into your product development processes, helping you focus your efforts, reduce your costs, accelerate time to market, and deliver the right solutions, right from the start. This training will be indispensable for anyone who wants to drive more successful, customer-focused product development: product and R&D managers, CTOs and development leaders, marketers, and senior business executives alike.

As Scrum teams mature their desire to work collaboratively with internal stakeholders and external customers increases. In this deep dive session Luke Hohmann will show how the serious games described in his book Innovation Games®: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play can be used to improve many Scrum practices. You will learn how to:

- Identify customer requirements for through the Product Box game
- Improve retrospectives through the Speed Boat game
- Prioritize your backlog through the online game Buy a Feature
- Plan a successful project through the game Remember the Future
- Develop better release plans through the game Prune the Product Tree

Register for the Scrum Gathering here.

When: Saturday, February 27, 2010
Where: Student Center at the University of California, Irvine
Registration and Information

Learn more about Product Camps!

ProductCampSoCal is:

• Grassroots organization – Your participation will make or break the event!
• Highly engaged & creative exchange increasing each individual’s skills & knowledge.
• Building and strengthening professional relationships while having a whole lot of fun.

ProductCampSoCal isn’t:

• A pre-determined set of speakers and topics.
• Polite attention & passivity in sessions nor does sole responsibility rest with presenters for successful sessions.
• Networking only at formal icebreakers and scheduled breaks.

Spread the word! Use #pcSC in tweets, and tag online posts with “ProdCampSoCal”.

Innovation Games® are serious games for working with customers and stakeholders to create higher value products and services. They are a means of fueling innovation by understanding what your customers really want. They can be played online or in-person, and have used by companies such as SAP, QUALCOMM, Emerson Climate Technologies, and Genesys to improve existing products and services and create new ones.

In this presentation, Luke Hohmann, author of Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play, will show how Innovation Games® can be used in New Product Development and ongoing product development processes to collaboratively identify, shape, and prioritize breakthrough products and services. This hands-on learning experience will feature an in-person game so that you can experience the power of the games through play.

Date/Time:
Thursday, February 18, 2010
8:30 a.m. to 10:00 a.m.

Location:
Scott’s Seafood Restaurant and Grill
855 El Camino Real
Town and Country Shopping Center
(Embarcadero and El Camino)
Palo Alto, CA 94301
(650) 323-1555

Pricing:
$15 BMA members / $30 non-members*

* NOTE: Due to increased attendance for this event, Scott’s has required the use of a separate meeting room and will not be providing separate breakfast tabs for each attendee. The fee above includes breakfast.

Register here.

If you have any questions about the event, please contact Reena Kapoor at reena@coniferinc.com