Agile Product Management, Marketing, and More
Archive for January, 2009
Text = Ambiguous
Jan 27th
Excuse the short post. One of the projects on my plate this week is an internal support system, from which requirements are being elicited from numerous potential users and business stakeholders throughout a number of segments of the company. The requirements that we’ve created are thorough to the point of potentially being unbuildable, because they support a number of ways of doing business that are in place in those various company segments.
The business is challenging the strategy of supporting all the ways of doing business, since stremalining them might lead to a better solution. The video featured here depicts the challenge of numerous stakeholders and business leaders in a realistic way, and thankfully I am able to state that we have delivered workflow diagrams to go along with the plentiful text-based requirements.
One of the things I’m trying to convince my team about is the advantage of delivering multiple types of models to provide several views of the requirements. To me, it makes the requirements more consumable than simple text or text plus one graphical view.
Enjoy!
ProductCamp Austin – Winter 2009
Jan 10th
On Saturday, January 24, 2009 it appears that I will be attending ProductCamp Austin. ProductCamp is part of the BarCamp family of participant-driven conferences, focused on product management and marketing.
Paul Young describes the experience of ProductCamp:
You head to the back wall and read the session names, offered by people just like you. You recognize a friend-of-a-friend’s name who is giving a session about “Connecting with Customers.” That sounds good – you use one post-it note. You see another session about “Agile Product Management.” Your engineering team is moving to Agile so that might be a good session to attend, and use your second note. As you step back to consider your third note, you see a dozen other people doing the same thing, and people feel geniuely torn about what to vote for – there are so many good sessions to choose from! Finally, you put your last sticky on a session called “Career Building in Product Management and Marketing.”
The conference currently cites over 156 participants including representatives from small startups to large technology players such as Dell, Cisco, and AT&T. I look forward to the organic mingling of people in the product management field, to sessions led by people experienced in the field, and of course to the happy hour after it’s over!
Hope to see you there!