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.

Occam's Razor

For at least one semester during college, but definitely not more than two, I wanted to be a Philosophy teacher.  At the time I got pretty into it and even took a job as a logic tutor for a bit.  As I recall I had more than a few one-semester-wonder majors before finally graduating; collecting little bits of information from each that have stuck with me in a jumble of facts, metaphors and bits of errata. About all I retained from my semester in philosophy was the principle of Occam's Razor--the principle states that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible. At the time it seemed like it might be a useful tool to remember and a clever thing to whip out in a conversation to impress people with. I'm guessing that the impression it left was more Cliff Clavin than
it was Frasier Crane. It was short enough to be easily remembered and quoted on demand, like Rudyard Kipling's White Man's Burden, which I memorized from the inscription to P.J. O'rourke's, Holiday's in Hell and often quoted at parties and college gatherings to make me sound like a disgruntled idealist with a subversive wit....and to impress girls. The impression it left? All Cliff--no wit, just git.

It may also have stuck with me due to the fact that it seems to comes up all the time in the classic science fiction I was addicted to at the time. Robert Heinlein and Philip K Dick appear unable to write a novel without referring to it. Their heroes and protagonists would quote the principle all the time to discover the explanation of some phenomenon critical to the survival of the human race and save the alien amazon heroine in the skin tight jumpsuit. This is also likely the source of influence that made me think it would sound cool and mysterious to quote things I knew little about at parties. That phenomenon, which in the 80's and 90's was fodder for John Hughes movies, NPR now referes to as Modern Jackass.

It had stuck with me long enough to come up as a search term for available URL's late one night, a decidedly less impressive use of Occam's Razor. The URL OccamRazor.com was available, it's previous owner was a World of Warcraft guild by the name of....Occam's Razor...who seemed to have abandoned or let lapse ownership.  Perhaps they felt it was a somewhat imperfect URL with it's missing 's'. Incidentally, the one with the 's' belongs to a finacial software consultancy in London, a group on the other end of the cool spectrum from the WoW guild. At any rate I snatched it up and intended to put it to good use. That was over a year ago and the best idea I've come up with is to start this blog. It's an idea I rate above the financial software consultancy's but not as good at the WoW guild.

It's Occam Razor, a blog about the zeitgeist and my opinions on them. The things and ideas that most simply explain the phenomenon of what's cool.  Zeitgeist, incidentally was another concept that made that late night URL search, it wasn't available though. Coincidentally it is owned by another financial technology consultant writing a blog on an astoundingly similar topic to this one. Already you must be questioning how good of an idea this is based on the company the URL is keeping, excepting of course the very cool WoW guild. WoW makes the cut and is part of the zeitgeist that I can only aspire to for OccamRazor.com.