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Workshop on social media for development teams

Posted by Tom Grant on September 1, 2009

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Tom Grant

In October, I'm doing a workshop in the Foster City office about social media for product teams. How can social media fill in the gaps left by traditional requirements? Which social media outlets should you use to answer particular questions? What skills and investments are required? What's the tangible business benefit?

A big part of the workshop is hands-on experience with the questions your team faces. Bring an example of a burning question that the product team needs to answer (e.g., What's the impact of dropping this feature? Is our product a good fit for similar business problems in other markets?), and we'll explore how to use social media to find substantive, useful answers quickly.

For more details, click here. Also, in a couple of weeks, colleague Laura Ramos is doing a workshop, "Making B2B Marketing Work," that chock full of useful content.

[Cross-posted at The Heretech.]

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The Heretech, episode 19: Steve Johnson on PM, pre- and post-Agile

Posted by Tom Grant on September 1, 2009

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Tom Grant

Hot on the heels of Agile 2009, I talk with Steve Johnson of Pragmatic Marketing, who has been training PMs for over a decade. Steve gives his overview of the PM track at Agile 2009, and I give a quick review of the event. (c) 2009 Tom Grant

Apple's mistaken mystique

Posted by Tom Grant on August 31, 2009

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Tom Grant

The Agile 2009 conference closed with a fascinating talk by Jared Spool. He's an extremely entertaining speaker, but what made Spool's talk especially engaging was the topic: What kind of teams are good at design? Or, to put it another way, why are some people user experience artists, and others just hacks?

Inevitably, when you talk about user experience, you wind up talking about Apple, the company that has based its success on building products that people really want to use. However, Spool gave a very different version of the Apple story than the one we usually hear. The starting point was this video, the view from 1987 of how people would use computers in 2010:

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Teleconference on Agile adoption next week

Posted by Tom Grant on August 26, 2009

Tom Grant

Next Monday, August 31, Forrester colleague Dave West and I will be presenting some of our preliminary results from our Agile adoption survey. (Which is still open, if you're interested in participating.) We'll be covering Agile adoption in both IT departments and technology industry companies, including the differences between the two.

Of course, everyone wants to know how many development teams have adopted Agile. My sneak peek for you is, "Substantially more than we had originally estimated." If you want to hear the full answer, here's the link for the teleconference.

[Cross-posted at The Heretech.]

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Best practices for PM leaders

Posted by Tom Grant on August 19, 2009

Tom Grant

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I had done some very interesting research on best practices for the people who run product management and product marketing organizations. Since we did the research for the Forrester Leadership Board (FLB) for that role, we couldn't share the final results beyond the FLB members themselves.

Good news: we have an excerpt available at this link (registration required to access it). We've anonymized the people we profiled, but their names and companies aren't the important details.

By choosing highly successful heads of PM teams, we got a glimpse into the future of PM. The thumbnail sketch of that picture: the profession is getting more clearly defined, because it is increasingly strategic. The PM role is making simultaneous progress as a profession, art, discipline, and the group with the broadest and deepest insight into the state of the overall business.

Big thanks to Steve Davidson for doing a lot of the work that made this excerpt possible. Steve is runs the FLB program for Technology Product Management (TPM) professionals.

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The Heretech, episode 17: Rich Mironov on Agile PM

Posted by Tom Grant on August 18, 2009

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Tom Grant

This week, Rich Mironov of Enthiosys tells us what happens when the two worlds of Agile and product management collide. Plus, a look ahead at the Agile 2009 conference, a reminder about the two surveys we're running, and musings on why technology coverage in mainstream newspapers generally stinks.

Announcing the Agile adoption survey

Posted by Tom Grant on August 7, 2009

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Tom Grant

Hot on the heels of the requirements survey (which is still available, if you haven't participated), we've launched the Agile adoption survey. Colleague Dave West and I are looking into the state of Agile adoption, looking for answers to commonly-asked questions like...

  • What aspects of Agile are getting stronger or weaker adoption?
  • How important are tools, coaching, and other aids?
  • How important is the flavor of Agile you select?
  • What types of organizations or projects seem to have the best chances of success with Agile?

If your organization is at any point in the Agile adoption curve, from an initial evaluation to a fully mature implementation, we'd love to hear how's it going. Here's the link that will take you straight to the survey.

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That was the week that was, part 2

Posted by Tom Grant on August 7, 2009

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Tom Grant

The other big project this week was a detailed analysis of a company's corporate and product marketing. We have a specific methodology, called a Vendor Positioning Review (VPR), that measures the ability of a company's publicly-available marketing materials to speak to both technical and business audiences. We also assess the connections (or lack thereof) between the corporate and product marketing content. We put these details into a tool, and out pops an assessment that suggests some important changes that may be necessary.

The VPR is based on what Forrester calls the IT to BT shift. In this shorthand, IT (information technology) delivers value only if the right combination of business and technical experts, working in tandem, can figure out whether there's any business value in it. BT (business technology) delivers value more quickly, because its creators design and market it to address particular business problems that plague people in particular jobs.

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That was the week that was, part 1

Posted by Tom Grant on August 7, 2009

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Tom Grant

If someone had stuffed me into the trunk of a car and driven to a remote location in the  Sierras, I could not have been more out of touch with the outside world than I was for a good chunk of the last week. As I mentioned earlier, I had two major projects to do on a short deadline, with barely enough time to finish them. Practically all other priorities went out the window, including (sadly) blogging and podcasting.

One of the projects covered exactly the same topic as a recent post, "Beware of the naked man," about differences in social media behavior across different demographic segments. The client wanted us to profile the same roles in different industries. Where did they go in Social Media Land, and what were they doing there?

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Beware of the naked man

Posted by Tom Grant on July 30, 2009

Tom Grant

I forgot to cross-post "Beware of the naked man" last night. Since people kindly left comments to the post, I have to rectify that oversight.

The post is about the role of social media in product requirements. Is it a supplement or replacement for other requirements sources? How hard is it to get good information out of social media?

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