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.

The Future is now

Got to talking with an old school buddy of mine today. Was looking for some information about technology books and publishing (he works at O'Reilly in my hometown). In the catchup part of the conversation he mentioned he was playing in a new band, The Community College. He quickly IM'ed me their MySpace page and sent me some of their tracks for my iPhone. Garage punk, circa 1977, if you're interested. We talked about their upcoming show in Sacramento. I posted a link to my Facebook to get the word out. Their cutting a 7" soon. Which would be cool, but I don't have turn table anymore. So he recommended I pick up this one that plugs into my MacBook Pro. Whole conversation took less than it took to write this blog post and happened completely over the net. Love it. Now if I can just find a USB enabled transporter so I can make the show.....then I'll really know it's the future.

It's lightweight conversations like these that are driving the communication patterns for modern marketing. I say lightweight because they are easy to initiate, spontaneous and immediately relevant to what you're going to do next. They completely blend the lines between personal and work. And they often include product and service recommendations based on personal experiences. They are semi-public via your social networks, so others can also be influenced by them. They are also extremely important to the individuals involved.

As Marketers it's important to be involved in the conversations when your products are part of the chatter. Being genuine is important, so product quality (in either direction) and transparency of marketing intention are king. Mad Men marketing approaches to this channel just don't work as well as they do in others. The goal I think is 'un-marketing', be transparent and no-bullshit approaches work best...misspellings ok.

Marketing Scrum

An open letter to David Booth at Gravity Gears in response to a LinkedIn query about Agile Practices applied to Marketing. January 2009.

 

“Hi David.

Good to hear from you. As it happens I do have some experience in applying Agile to marketing departments.

I've implemented Scrum here at Serena for the Product Marketing group (6 people) and am the scrum master. We've had great success using it to organize work and to minimize the impact of "fire drills". We use many elements of Scrum, although certainly not all of them apply (for example I've not figured out how to apply automated testing to marketing in a literal sense). We have daily stand ups with the team to check progress. Our team is distributed across 3 states, so we use the phone, webex and an Agile tool to help. We write user stories and track them in Serena's Agile On Demand product (Full disclosure: I work for Serena and a senior product marketing manager for this product). That's were we keep our burndown charts and use a virtual task board to share information and burn down story points. We also use planning poker to size and estimate work. We're using two week sprints an have bi-weekly planning meetings. All members of the team write stories, but our manager, the director of product marketing, acts as the product owner to set story priority and help organize stories into themes.

It has yielded some excellent benefits. It has increased cooperation and cross pollination between distributed team members. It helps us provide a litmus test to fire drill projects from outside the group by allowing us to show what work would be displaced if we take on a fire drill and then allow the requester to judge if it really needs to be done, or if it can wait until the next sprint. This has greatly smoothed out the flow of work and provided immense visibility to other marketing and sales groups into what the Product Marketing group is working on. Many stakeholders from outside the department participate by listening in on the daily standups and help contribute story acceptance criteria.

In the next sprint (we have since done this with success) we are implementing a Demo Phase, where we show what work has been completed for review by stakeholders. We think this will greatly increase visibility and collaboration with other departments. There is already allot of interest in extending this method to other departments in the company (our web team is now part of the Scrum).

Our Developer Teams already use Agile as well. Jeff McKenna, one of the co-founders of Scrum, provided some basic training for all members of the Scrum. And then he has essentially been my coach and the team's coach for working out our adoption. It's great fun, has yielded benefits immediately and I think is improving the quality of the work and reducing stress in the team.

I think allot of the things marketing teams do already in the course of their work are Agile by nature. Teams do tend to be self-organizing, requirements are frequently changing, work is constantly changing in priority. Using Agile as a framework for structuring the work actually helps give meaning and structure to a process that otherwise can seem chaotic. In particularly I think it gives the individual contributors in the marketing department a clear list of objectives and work to be completed in the short term while still giving them the ability to change if required.

Patchen Noelke”

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.