Oct-7-08: “Prioritizing for Profit” talk at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley
Luke Hohmann, Enthiosys CEO/Founder and author of Beyond Software Architecture, will give a talk for CMU/CMSV students and alumni.
When: Tuesday, October 7, 5:30 PM – 6:30 PM
Where: Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley, Building 23/Room 129, Moffett Field (directions)
Contact: please RSVP to Stacy Marshall
Cost: Free
Prioritizing for Profit
One of the central tenants of Agile practices is the emphasis on customer value. That’s great, but if you’re a product company then focusing on business value alone isn’t enough. You need to convert business value into actual money flowing into your company. Consider, for example, a company that offers their product through a perpetual license with an annual maintenance fee. Customers expect the product to continue to improve in every release. But if the company doesn’t understand how to extract more money from its customers for each release, pretty soon they won’t be able to keep releasing at all! Same structure, different rules for other kinds of products. Consider a SaaS provider of software solutions that charges a monthly fee per user. Should the product simply keep getting better every month for the same price?
Luke Hohmann’s talk will provide you with a proven process for how to prioritize a backlog for profit. It will debunk the mistaken theory that you can prioritize a backlog for ROI and provide concrete examples of how to structure backlogs and releases to ensure that while you’re providing business value to your customers, they’re equally motivated to recognize this business value and put more money back into your product. It will teach value exchange models (how your customers exchange money for value) and profit engines (how you make more money for providing more value) so that you can continue to practice Agile for a long time.
