Occam Razor

Better product roadmaps - 2 tools to help you

 

 I just spent the last two days of the week in Product Owner (CSPO) class with Mitch Lacey and Luke Hohmann in downtown Bellevue.

One of the things that really stuck with me from the class was a section that Luke did on road-mapping. There were two things he did that I thought were really valuable. Valuable enough that I'm sitting here in a coffee shop writing this post on Saturday morning waiting for my product manager, Peter Goubert, to show up so we can start using some of the mojo I learned in class on our own product roadmaps for Agile On Demand and TeamTrack. 

The first valuable thing are the Innovation Games® we played in class. Those are activities wedid  help us collaborate and solve complex problems like prioritizing backlogs, planning roadmaps and negotiating business value. The games come in a lot of flavors and are for playing with your team, your stakeholders and your customers. I've played them a couple of times now with my team at Serena, with citizens at Games for Democracy and am planning them for customers at an Agile Tech-Day in New York next month. The net of the games is that they are a way to interact with opinionated groups of people, get them to drop their inhibitions and find out what they really think and know. One of the games we played, called Prune the Product Tree, worked very well for taking a backlog of items for a product and mapping them against key dates and dependencies to start the creation of a meaningful product roadmap.

The second valuable tool is a pattern language and template for creating roadmaps that actually work. You can find them here. The template takes into a lot of factors and organizes them into related swim lanes, which allows me to take into account a 'real' business value for the release. It's meant to be visual so you can blow it up and hang it on the wall. Developer teams use them to understand the what and why of the schedule, managers can understand what and why to prioritize and stakeholders can understand what and when to promote and push to customers. It's the best holistic view of a road map that I've seen. And I'm eager to put it into action with my own group. It also fit together nicely with the games and it made sense to take the results of a game, like prune the product tree, and apply it to a visual graph of the roadmap using the template.

The games are excellent if you're looking for a way to re-envigorate your customer and stakeholder conversations. They help to re-focus conversations and get the meat behind what people are telling you. I find them very valuable and if you're lucky enough to be in a city where Luke's got a games class coming up you might want to check it out.

Really useful resources presentation on using Social Media for Product Market Research

Use of social media for product market research ss

View more presentations from Scott Gilbert.

Innovation Games

Luke Hohmann has got me going on his Innovation Games® ideas. I sat down with him over coffee a few weeks back. He wanted to talk about using the games not just for product management but adapting them for use in outbound sales and marketing efforts. The idea has really resonated with me. 

The games are a natural fit for classic PM's who want to interact with existing users to identify pain points and prioritize lists of future features. They are a better vehicle than classic customer advisory boards and focus groups. Or perhaps its more accurate to say they are a better way to handle your CABs and focus groups than traditional questionnaires, usability tests and 'open discussions'. The games take advantage of a social sigma like process to improve products through social feedback. You might say that companies can use things like Twitter, UserVoice or Get Satisfaction to replace their electronic suggestion box (suggestions@email.com or feedback@email.com), while Innovation Games® can replace stuffy survey's, questionnaires and stale CABs with real social interaction that matters.

The next leap as Luke was describing it to me is to use the games proactively for sales and marketing. Taking the games beyond the classic PM realm.

I'm going to attend the a CSPO class with Luke and Mitch Lacey here in a few weeks, they're going to play a few of the games in the class. I'm looking for as much exposure to them as possible. Coming up on April 7th, I'm going to run one of the games, along with Jeff McKenna at the Bay Area Tech Day for Serena Software. We're going to use the Speedboat game with attendees to identify pain points in our customer relationships and establish a benefit to solving each.