Toluu

Tyner Blain

Software product success.

Stakeholders in a BarrelDecember 31 2008

There’s really only one way to travel down a waterfall - in a barrel.  A lot of people died this way, but some survived.  Software projects have been predominantly waterfall projects since the start of software projects.  And stakeholders rode down those projects, basically in a barrel.  The people riding Niagara Falls 100 years ago didn’t know if they would survive until they got to the end.  Stakeholders in waterfall projects don’t know if they will succeed until the end.

An agile project is dependent upon tight interaction (and feedback) with stakeholders.

If you’re running an agile project, and your stakeholders are old-school barrel-riders, how do you make it work?

Expectations, Documentation, and Communication

The success of any project is dependent on setting and managing stakeholder expectations.  In Managing Stakeholder Goals, we talked about assuring that those goals are addressed by our requirements.  And in a later article, we proposed a way to balance the goals of different stakeholder groups when those goals are in opposition.  Those are good t

Inspired By Your CustomersDecember 18 2008

Should your products be designed by your customers, or inspired by your customers?

Getting Inspired

We talk about designing products for customers, getting feedback from customers, focusing on problems, and the differences between requirements and design.  I’ll wager that every product manager has thought about these things.

J.D. Meier wrote a good article about the best practices of being a product manager, including a tip to get customers (or their proxies) directly connected to developers.  After enjoying the article, I was reading through the comments.  And I got to #11, from “Bob.”  In his comment, Bob said [bold is mine]:

“…Building a product that customers will want to buy means transforming those needs into product specifications. You don’t want a product designed by your customers, you want a product inspired by your customers. That means thinking about wants and needs in a different way….”

Thanks Bob.

There are some ideas, or phrasings of ideas that just stick with you.  Maybe I’m receptive because I just read the wikipedia artic

ProductCamp Austin Winter 2009December 11 2008

The second productcamp for Austin is just around the corner!  Are you going to be there?  You should.

Announcement

Paul Young has written a great announcement and explanation of what product camp is.  I really enjoyed and benefited from the one we did last spring, and I can’t wait to attend and present at this one!  If you are or can be in the Austin area on Jan 24th, make sure you head to the UT Austin College of Communications CMB building, studios 4B through 4E from 8 to 5:30.  And the networking afterwords is sure to be even better than last year too.

Presentation Topics

A key takeaway from our first productcamp was that people most enjoyed the presentations that were more collaborative.  These sessions tended to give attendees the ability to immediately put to use some really good ideas.  I’ll wager that we’ll have a mix of presentation styles again this year, but that it will skew to the interactive and practical.  The roundtables were also very well received, and I hope we’ll have more of those too.

I’m really loo

Simple Agile Model ExampleDecember 3 2008

A picture is worth a thousand words.  Agile values working software over comprehensive documentation, and it values customer collaboration over contract negotiation.  With that in mind, how much is a picture of a model worth?  Check out a simple example, how it helped, and what we didn’t do.

A Complex Conversation

I was working with a client on an eCommerce website, where one of the things that was important to the client was having and managing an affiliate network that refers visitors (and ultimately customers) to the website. The conversations around exactly what the stakeholders of the eCommerce site wanted were pretty convoluted, and different stakeholders described the “requirements” differently.

Affiliate Network Background

An affiliate network can work in the following way:

1. When someone visits a website, and does so by directly clicking on a link on an affiliate partner’s page, the website is able to identify the affiliate partner who “sent” the visitor to the website.
2. The website keeps track of who “sent” the visitor.
3. If the

Keeping up With ChangeNovember 27 2008

How quickly is your market changing?  Bet it’s faster than you thought.

Michael Ray Hopkin points us to a great video presentation on the rate of change / growth in our society.