As a precursor to the Agile Australia 2012 conference to be held in Melbourne, a product afternoon was held at the Hilton on the Park in Melbourne in November and had a good variety of Australian speakers. The success of the event means a similar event is being schedule for Sydney in February 2012. Here are my notes from the event:
Look What Happened When We Let Customers into the Product Development Loop at Lonely Planet!
need to avoid the next bench design problem – only ask the person on the next bench about quality, do not go to the wider world
for Lonely Planet, realisation was a competitor in the market who produced a colour guide, no sales the month they launched
went to customers 4 times in the process, took publishing from 2 years to 9 months, visualise the project
Rob Adams talks about getting the developers to do some of the initial marketing calls
Marketing is from Venus, IT is from Mars – and the Customer Doesn’t Care
Daniel Oertli from REA Group led this discussion that he hastily renamed to “5 Kick Ass Principles for Customer-led Development”, his slides are available here.
effect of marketing has changed over the last 5-10 years, we no longer control the marketing channel, need customer admiration
be a peeping Tom. Regularly – there is only one customer, the people who pay for products, none of this internal customer bull####, hard to put your business on the road regularly to talk to customers
5 on Friday – Silverback on Mac, 5 internal employees for 15 minutes and ask them to do specific tasks with your product (eg. show me how to change the default colour scheme), continue to do this every Friday as parts of the product are developed
don’t ask for the solution – to get creative you need to figure it out internally, great people create great things
day and half every quarter – hack day – off tools, schedule around it, put ideas on intranet and vote, teams form around the idea self-forming, winning team gets a cash prize and gets sponsored product into production
2 week inception process – use business canvas mapping to lay out the business drivers
democratize design – hard to get excited about something if you have not been part of the design, get everybody to draw
ready, fire, aim – Agile gives us opportunity to change things in motion but most organisations still execute iteratively what is planned up front, Agile gives you a bullet frequently, be very clear about your minimal marketable features, be ruthless about what you send to your Agile teams, you have a lot of go’s at this
teams win – good people outperform any processes, keep teams very small (6-8 people), have a mix of business fundamental understanding, lead designer and lead technologist and there for skills not core decision making, trust is essential
dealing with resistance – hardest change of all was getting business on the journey, need to get culture sorted and get teams focussed
more of what people do is outside of their hierarchy, biggest impact is dynamic thinking by thinking of type of things we will do rather than what we will do
public companies need a plan to show to shareholders, challenge is to make it more dynamic after that
engage people in their career progression – still report to a lead, but 90% of the time they live with their cross functional team – more about stretching their knowledge in their domain so have practice meetings
SEEK’s Approach to Product Innovation
Doug Blue from SEEK presented this session, his slides are available here.
put customers before profits – no display advertising on the front pages, founder would prefer to have a dollar tomorrow rather than a dollar today
build for the long term – customer core needs, competitive advantage, long term trends and shareholder value, in GFC let customers negotiate out of long term contracts
strive for a rock solid core and out innovate the competition – focussed on number of ads and size of audience, now need to focus on the product
focus – do a few things very well, carried this over to the iPhone app as well, but run business on the things that are do-able
people engagement – never compromise on engagement
data driven decisions – if we build or change something, we measure it
test and learn – put it out in market and do course correction
balancing customer needs – 3 different customers with different needs (job seeker, employer, recruiters) – came up with an invisible salary to balance the needs
on bigger initiatives, need to do your homework
A Start-up Approach to Product Delivery in a Corporate Environment
XP Explained lacked an explanation on how to communicate effectively with customers to understand what they wanted to achieve
base costs on optimum team sizes that can manage constant delivery of a number of system concerns
have no process, when problems occur, take those problems away
don’t use iterations, they constrain the customer, need to be able pick up any card and get it into Production
ideas wall – backlog for where the business is going, anyone can post ideas on it
don’t talk about what the product we are delivering should do, talk about what the business should do
challenge everything – stand ups are almost useless in large organisations – only say things what people in the circle need to know about, because they work together, so they should know
most people in large organisations are disempowered – how do I know I am doing the right thing? Just do it, everyone is the business
need to help everyone understand the market – understand what the impact of features are
whole of company showcases every Friday
need multi disciplined teams that understand the market they are striving for
Panel: Why is Customer-led Product Development so Hard?
Keith Dodds from ThoughtWorks led this panel with all of the above speakers. Some of the key learnings were:
if you have leaders that are customer focussed, everything else will follow
most organisations try to make the workforce effective and efficient by putting structures around them, need to retain a functionalised structure and stay away from specialisation
companies are introverted because traditionally they have not had access to customers
it’s hard to keep up with all of the tools out there – there is lots technology to seek out what the customers are viewing
most products are designed to be obsolete within 1-2 years, especially those that are consumer focussed
companies are not set up to evolve things, they are setup to build, the world has changed where everything is outdated the minute you deploy
grass roots movements are usually the most enduring
most companies lack the balls to shut things down when they need to
frugal innovation – constraints help you channel great ideas, would be interesting to apply some artificial constraints to hack days
what doesn’t work are artificial constraints and the team know it
next C level job will be the chief designer – targeting the customer
Agile helps to get a customer led product out, because the person who wants the product can talk to the person who builds the product
report on value delivered to the business rather than velocity
the pool of talent is not that big, how do you keep people motivated – sense of purpose, sense of meaning (problems that have currency in the real world), ability to react and shape, ability to be heard, about making a difference
where do great Product Managers come from, how do we develop and train these people
Day 4 at Agile 2011 brought a full day sessions full day of sessions followed by the conference dinner. For the first session I used the law of two feet and landed in three different sessions.
Stages of Practice: the Agile Tech Tree
Arlo Belshee and James Shore led this hands on session to build a technical tree of agile practices. I didn’t stay for long, but I was interested in the output, which I found hanging on the walls later in the day.
Steve Denning (author of a large number of leadership books) delivered this presentation based around a blog post of a similar name that I sat in for about 30 minutes. His presentation is available here.
delight is happiness, joy, customer success – everybody has a story or understands this concept
identify your project that you wish to delight – who is your customer?
what do customers say they want? – warning! they don’t always know eg. New Coke
what is it that core customers might not like about your product? eg .why they made the Nespresso machine because people did not like cleaning up, need to get inside their head to understand what you need to change
Agile From the Top Down: Executives Practicing Agile
Jon Stahl delivered this session, and I wish I had been there for this one all the way through as his presentations are always entertaining and informative. His slides are available here.
get HR to create their own room to map the organisation and look for patterns – finding the truth isn’t simple but putting stuff on walls creates conversation
create a tool wall – who cares what tool you use, as long as you are adding value
get the practice vocabulary up on the wall – matched with a booklet with more detail
when tracking practices move away from traffic lights and use smiley faces to track how people are feeling – don’t care about if they are doing stand ups but how are they working for them – good way to figure out where to send coaches, where the frowns are
transparent leadership – post and show your people what roadblocks you are working on
everybody wakes up everyday thinking they are doing the best thing they can – as a business the executives need to check each other to make sure they are working on the most important thing and allow each other to question
Relish – the only way the customer will read Cucumber tests
two way mirrors – ensure the users are integrated into development and they can use the software, outside the building
good coders find stuff hard – easy to Cucumber test the full stack but the build time blows, unit tests are hard but are fast, so limit the amount of cucumber tests and isolate them
features rot if the Customer does not read them or not exposed via tools like Relish
manual testers duplicate automated tests – expose features, pair, give Cucumber ownership to QA
how to test lots of permutations – pairwise testing is OK, or just automate the happy path and one scenario and manual test the rest
metrics – JUnit Max to predict probability of failure
Limited Red – calculates the probability of Cucumber failure to improve the way we work – found features that never fail – just keep them in nightly build – means a long build usually fails very quickly
use JMeter to check everything is up like a tracer bullet – eg. a row has appeared in a table
got 8 hour build down to 20 minutes by distributing over 24 EC2 nodes – but think we were solving the wrong problem
slice up the architecture and have thin tests to test them
Spork – helps to speed up the start up time of an application – hard to know whether to reload and it adds a lot of overload at the protocol layer, so almost as efficient to run the tests
people have core responsibilities but we all meld in our roles to be one team and deliver
I enjoyed this session, particularly as I read about Joseph’s company in Specification By Example. I am excited about the prospect of a tool such as Limited Red as well.
Telling Better Stories with User Story Mapping
Jeff Patton led this session to a packed room that included a live appearance from his children! His slides are available here.
how to change the world – start with an idea which is product > feature > specification > requirement
learnt that requirement means “shutup just build it”
outcomes result in impact – agile is to maximize outcome and impact we get
stories are a conversation about the future
stories are 5c’s – card –> conversation –> confirmation –> construction –> consequences (when we realise our ability to predict the future sucked!)
Kent Beck called them stories because they were meant to be heard
need to figure out the who, what, why – this is the richness behind the story
add a short title, add a description (story template), add notes, specifications and sketches and write acceptance criteria before writing software
stories shrink in size and grow in detail as they travel through a pipeline
start with capabilities or features (understand value) –> break to release size stories– > upcoming iteration stories (priority, UI design, business rules) –> break to iteration size stories (details user acceptance tests, small enough to fit in iteration) –> completed bits of software
user story mapping – based on story mapping in films
ultimately we have big things that break down to little things
Build story maps by:
talking to real users
brainstorm user tasks to help them organize
research and build from a narrative
discussions with users in front of a map drive out conversations
plan incremental releases as a team event – developers will actually read the plan
start talking about adding stickies and notes, finally get a fist of five for confidence
don’t prioritise user stories by ROI – target a user segment
like ripping a $5 note, the small stories are not valuable (Jeff actually ripped a $5 note to illustrate the point)
Finally, Jeff has a User Story Mapping book in the pipeline which looks really interesting. I have had the pleasure of meeting Jeff a few times and always enjoy his presentation and learnings, and I am keen to give these learnings a go in my next storycard workshop.
Flirting With Your Customers
Jenni Jepsen delivered this presentation, the slides are available here.
We started with an exercise – 3 things that make a great project – trust, hard work, common goals, transparency, clear direction, grown ups, togetherness, support, communication, budget, right skills, creativity, quality, teamwork, fun, support
We then discussed 3 things that make a great romantic relationship – trust, communication, clear expectations, respect, common goals, honesty, integrity, similar values, enjoy spending time together, depth, support, compromise, patience, back rubs, teamwork, equality, chemistry, humour, passion, sacrifice
there is a lot of commonality between projects and a relationship
flirting is about making people feel valued
need human touch to thrive, keeps immune systems strong
people who are happy and feel valued at work results in increased profit
introverts need to take care of themselves, take energy from within – they can flirt but it takes energy
extroverts thrive in social situations – if your customer is an introvert they may not share your energy
The 8 steps are:
radar – makes you aware of the people around you, takes confidence
target – figuring out who you want to connect with in an organization, who has the real power
move in – show interest, practice your opening line – make eye contact, making the person feel like they have knowledge, makes them feel valuable, interactions become richer because of this
back off a little – the other person may not be ready for the interaction, give the other person space
open up – being honest and laying it out, you have now created a comfort zone, you are also making yourself vulnerable, there might be some back and forward bargaining here
dance – have a little fun, create conversation – lunch, cook together, virtual coffee over Skype, celebration to mark a milestone, dinner club
get real – go through a crisis together, if you have flirted and built a relationship
enjoy – enjoy the relationship
have a list of questions to get over the anxiety
all good steps for people you manage
body language is 93% of communication
Conference Party
The conference party was entertaining as always. Here is me hanging out with Alan Bustamante (who I worked with on the reviews) and the gang from Seapine Software
Tony and Craig are at Agile Australia in Melbourne and they (finally) catch up with Martin Kearns, the Chief Digital Officer at Innodev and co-organiser of Scrum Australia, and they chat about:
Craig Smith 
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