Which business problems will Google Wave address?
A few weeks ago, I watched the Google Wave launch video with a mix of interest and nervousness. A big part of my reaction was shaped (warped?) by my experience doing product management and product marketing for collaboration and content management products. While I didn't launch myself at the screen yelling "Noooooooo!" (in slow motion), I did worry that Google might walk straight into an all-too-familiar minefield of competing solution areas.

Collaboration and content management pose a classic problem in requirements and design: Which solution do you want to target? If you build a product without prioritizing among all the different business problems that it might address, you'll build a very "horizontal" product that satisfies no one. Or, worse, it makes perfect sense to you, but everyone else struggles to see how it will best work for them.

We're doing a major research project on the state of product requirements in the technology industry.  To make this project as successful as possible, we need your participation in either or both aspects of it, the survey and the examples. (Whichever works for you.)

What's in it for you? When the final research document is done, we'll give you a copy. We also promise to keep any information you provide confidential.

The survey
We just launched the survey at the following link:

http://deploy.ztelligence.com/start/survey/survey_taking.jsp?PIN=15TQ9CMTFTDDZ

If you have approximately 20 minutes to spare, we're interested in hearing how you collect, write, review, and circulate requirements in your organization. Also, please feel free to forward this link to anyone you think would be interested in participating in this survey.

I have boardgames on the mind lately, since game development has some interesting parallels to product development in the technology industry. Today's twist: Boardgame designers put a lot of effort into creating a particular experience. There are lots of ways to make bad design decisions, but the really good ones don't reveal themselves unless you "playtest" them. Unfortunately, the "user experience" testing for a $100,000 piece of technology often isn't nearly as rigorous as the playtesting for a $30 boardgame.

For the full discussion, follow this link to The Heretech blog.

In this episode, Israel Gat illuminates the ways in which Agile adoption depends on organizational and cultural factors. We also muse about Helmut von Moltke, 19^th century military Agilist. (Go look it up!)

Plus, a brief review of an even briefer document about innovation in “knowledge-creating” companies, and a heads-up about some upcoming survey research about product requirements and Agile adoption. Copyright (c) 2009 Tom Grant