The Heretech

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

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

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:

While certainly the futurists of 1987 didn't get every detail right, the user experience of today has many elements that they anticipated. Video chat, mash-ups, e-learning...I'll gladly take them over the bow tie-wearing avatar any day.

Apple's product strategy for the last two decades has been the fulfillment of this vision. Apple defined itself as the company that was going to bring people the user experience of the future; step by step, that's exactly what they've been trying to build.

That's a much different explanation of Apple's success than the personal genius of Steve Jobs and various engineers in his employ. Steve jobs may be exactly like his public persona, and the individual engineers at Apple may be among the brightest working in the technology industry.

Unfortunately, as many great follies and failures have demonstrated, putting an organization in the hands of the best and brightest (in the famous phrase of David Halberstam, describing the architects of the Vietnam War) is no assurance of success. A vision of what your products will be able to do, 5 years or more into the future, was one of Spool's traits of companies that were good at design. Uncompromising leaders and brilliant engineers then move the company and its products into that future.

What we're discussing is more than just an interesting piece of tech industry history. The Apple myth has enduring power beyond just Apple's consumers and investors. People in other companies try to emulate the Apple example, to whatever extent they can (despite occasional warnings that "you can't innovate the way Apple does"). The formula that many teams assume will bring success--hire world-class engineers, under the leadership of a innovative CTO, architect, founder, or development manager--is based on a story that is, at best, incomplete, and therefore misleading.

There are undoubtedly other elements missing from the "vulgar Apple-ism" philosophy. For example, I suspect that Apple does a wee bit more user testing than they discuss in public. Apple is also capable of bad designs. While iTunes is a raging success as a tool for downloading songs, it's a clumsy MP3 library tool, especially if you have tens of thousands of music files to manage.

Incomplete, simplistic stories can turn into pernicious myths. The oath to protect and serve is important, but it doesn't stop a small percentage of police officers from becoming corrupt. The free market does punish stupid decisions, but that wasn't enough to deter some bankers from taking dangerous risks. Many well-intentioned people enter politics, but they need more than just pure souls to craft public policy that has the intended effects. And development teams need more than just smart people to build well-designed products.

Get well soon, Ken Schwaber

During the Agile 2009 conference, we got news that a truck hit Ken Schwaber, one of the Agile movement's founders, while he was cycling near his home in Massachusetts. All the best to him for a speedy recovery.

Teleconference on Agile adoption next week

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 Forrester product management blog.]

The Heretech, episode 18: Mary Gerush on requirements

This week, Forrester analyst Mary Gerush and I discuss product requirements, business analysts, and product managers. Plus, news from Day One of Agile 2009, and a review of a blog series on the future of publishing that should have known when to stop. Copyright (c) 2009 Tom Grant

Survey links: Up, and to the right

For your convenience, I've put links to the Agile adoption and product requirements surveys to in a box in the upper right quadrant of this blog.

Best practices for PM leaders

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.

[Cross-posted at The Forrester product management blog.]

Listening is hard

Both product managers and product marketers have to be top-notch professional listeners. Among other consumers of the insights that come from listening, the development team depends on product management to be the conduit of useful information from the outside world. Arguably,  listening to users, stakeholders, partners, and other "outsiders" is the supreme skill among skills for PM. If you fail to listen, every other PM responsibility falls apart.

Unfortunately, for professionals on the move, listening is inherently hard. There's always the next appointment, the urgent e-mail, the distractions from what you're doing right here, right now. To compound matters, there's the company's own agenda, or your personal agenda, that interferes with your listening ability. The mental HUD that overlays your conversations with customers puts bright and flashing circles around the statements you want to hear.

But don't feel too bad. Everyone struggles to be a good listener. In a Fresh Air interview this week, Lisa Sanders, who just wrote a book about the alarmingly high frequency of medical misdiagnosis, cited a study that found that doctors wait an average of only 20 seconds before they interrupt their patients' account of their symptoms. Even when the stakes are, quite literally, life and death, doctors can't shut up long enough to hear all the important details, even though any particular detail might be critical for the diagnosis.

Product managers and product marketers also struggle to listen. For instance, you might pay attention just long enough to hear an IT person say that your boffo collaboration tool should help them solve a particular problem. Unfortunately, for psychological and organizational reasons, you might overlook the critical qualifier, should.

For the same reasons, when the IT person starts talking about some of the obstacles they've faced when rolling out collaboration tools, you might jump immediately to the 101 sure-fire ways to  overcome these obstacles. Swallow those suggestions. At this point, your job is just to listen carefully, and to think about the other people in this organization, beyond IT, you might also need to hear—you know, the people who are actually using your tool, and not just implementing it.

The Heretech, episode 17: Rich Mironov on Agile PM

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. Copyright (c) 2009 Tom Grant

Companies compete, products don't

Adam Bullied's recent post about competitive analysis is really good, but it's missing an essential point that technology companies frequently overlook: Companies compete, products don't.

That's not the same as saying that product comparisons are worthless. Of course it makes a difference that Product A can do more than Product B, as long as Vendor A and Vendor B are in the same market. Often, because of the complexity of the market, as well as its immaturity, technology vendors overlook the second part of that principle.

Similar products may not ever bump into each other because of accidents of geography. Ichitaro, the big competitor to Microsoft Word in Japan, has practically no international market. At other times, analogous products burrow into particular vertical niches so deeply that they never see each other. The specialized document management products you still find in the biotech, financial services, and legal markets theoretically could compete with one another, but don't.

Of course, a potential competitor might become an actual one, jumping across geographical or vertical boundaries. However, even if that were to happen, two companies in the same business might have radically different business models, in which case, the competition between them may be more apparent than real. For example, Singularity certainly has products to support Agile development, but they also do a brisk business in selling consulting and training.  (Their Agile approach to BPM is particularly interesting.) In contrast, VersionOne is more of a product company. Both are trying to serve Agile product teams, but to what degree do they really compete?

A competitive analysis that doesn't include the details about the competitors has very limited value. The real threat may be the vendor that has a weaker product, but has a greater ability to market and sell to your customer base. What profiteth a vendor that builds a superior product, but loses its market?

Search in a social age

The killer application for the Internet has been search. While social media may not topple search from its throne, it has created a new center of gravity for content. The more content that social media generates, the more it needs to be searched...Or maybe not.

And here's where the core question for product managers and product marketers raises its head: What is the user trying to do? Thus far, the fundamental assumption behind Internet search design has been, "Users understand keywords, but nothing else." The clever algorithms behind Google or Bing base search results exclusively on what you are trying to find. The ubiquitous text box where you enter keywords doesn't ask you why.

The rapidly-growing pile of user-generated content, stacked next to the still-growing pile of standard material, may change search design. For example, if I'm looking for information about the White Stripes, I might be happy to get their official web site, the relevant Wikipedia entry, and maybe a few places where I can buy their CDs. I don't necessarily care that someone with the Twitter ID sirburpsalot proclaims his unrequited passion for Meg White every day, or that there's a lively discussion about the Jack White/Rolling Stones connection  in a Facebook group. At another time, that may be exactly the content I want to read. (Except for sirburpsalot, who's just an annoying twit.)

Declaring the purpose behind the search, or the kind of content I want to skim, is an increasing necessity. Of course, that raises all kinds of questions about the federated search architecture that's needed to make these declarations possible, which has echoes in the old-school, inside-the-firewall search challenges. There's always a good argument for being able to search your e-mail, documents, contacts, expense reports, performance reviews, and office supply orders all at once, but in many organizations, the implementation cost outweighed the business benefits. If you want to find out the status of your order for 100 mechanical pencils, go to the self-service office supply application.

For similar reasons, a lot of user-generated content may not get hooked into Internet search the way some people might expect, or hope. There needs to be a business argument for both Google and Facebook for one to be able to search the other in some new fashion. All of which makes this paragraph critical in the InfoWorld article covering this topic:

A music label, for example, would be interested in searches on YouTube, she said. MySpace, meanwhile, focuses on searches for people, while LinkedIn is about business searches, Dougherty added. "The actual content that's happening on each of the social networks is very, very different in terms of the searches that are happening," she said.

For product managers involved with social media or search, the use cases for search have a direct impact on the product roadmap and feature prioritizations. For the product marketer, these same use cases are the language that you need to speak to convey value.

Other fun things to do at Agile 2009

Agile adoption interviews
While Dave West and I are attending Agile 2009, we'd also like to interview people about their Agile adoption experiences. If you've taken the survey, and you're interested in talking further while we're all together in hot and humid Chicago, drop me a line and let me know.

Product management needs analysis
Also, I'll have my Amazing Product Management/Product Marketing Department Needs Analyzer (not the real name). I'm always keen on refining it further, so if you're interested in giving it a whirl, let me know. The tool has two purposes:

• Refine the job description for an individual PM. The tool also profiles sub-types like technical product managers and community managers.
• Calculate the staffing requirements for the PM team. Once again, this step includes all the PM sub-types.

Going to Agile 2009? Got a question?

Forrester colleague Dave West and I will both be at Agile 2009 later this month. If you, Dear Reader, are also attending, I'd be delighted to meet you in person. Drop me a line to let me know that you're attending, and maybe we can figure out how to connect in Chicago.

Chances are that you have questions about Agile, the state of PM in the tech industry, social media, or other topics that I cover. If you're a Forrester analyst, let's turn the conversation into an official inquiry! I always prefer to have conversations in person than over the phone, and Agile 2009 may be a good opportunity to do so.  Some sample topics from recent inquiries include:

• How does the rest of our company need to adjust to Agile adoption in the development team?
• How can we revamp our requirements process?
• How can we use social media to help capture and assess good ideas?
• How can we add product management discipline to our IT organization?
• What's a reasonable estimate for the size of the R&D organization (including QA and PM) in a SaaS company?
• Do tech companies apply product portfolio management discipline to Agile teams?
• What's the relationship, if any, among tools designed to help with requirements, portfolio management, and innovation?

I'm Don Draper, and you're not

Completely off-topic, the new season of Mad Men starts this weekend. I'm a huge fan of the show, so it was fun taking the "Which Mad Men Character Are You?" quiz. Being Don Draper is great, and Roger Sterling would have been OK, too.

You can't spell "open source" without C

The headline of this article should be, "C remains the dominant language in open source projects." Instead, the author chose to highlight that PHP and JavaScript are on the rise. But why?

The continued importance of C is not terribly surprising. After all, how would you create software like the Apache web server, or the Dovecot IMAP/POP server, in PHP or JavaScript? The almost apologetic tone of the article ("Gosh, sorry, we haven't dominated open source yet, but we're working on it") is not only unnecessary, but largely inappropriate.

The Heretech, episode 16: Stefan Ried on cloud computing

Stefan Ried and I discuss cloud computing, the technology and the business model. Plus, news of two surveys, and a prime example of inbound social media. Copyright (c) 2009 Tom Grant

Stalked by Sony

On a lark, I tweeted this morning about the movie Julie & Julia. I loved half of the movie, the part about Julia Child. I hated the other half, covering the "Julia Child" blogger Julie Powell. During the movie, I couldn't wait for Amy Adams, who played Powell, to get off the screen. After the movie, I learned that the characterization of her in the movie (earnest, waifish, sympathetic) white-washed the real person (foul-mouthed, narcissistic, and generally not nice to people, including her husband, friends, and even the 9/11 families).

A few minutes after I posted that message, Twitter alerted me that the user "Julie and Julia," a marketing vehicle for the movie, is now following me. Not only is this unwelcome, but it's also more than a little creepy. That's probably not the effect that Sony Pictures wants.

Tessaract now, before it's too late!

I don't have anything snarky to say about augmented reality (AR). It's an old concept (at least as old as some of the cyberpunk motifs of the 1980s), but there's now the underlying technology to make it a reality, however virtual. It's way too early to tell what the important applications of this technology will be.

Unfortunately, every new technology has its share of snark-worthy enthusiasts.  AR applications like the one that lets you see, through your mobile phone, where people you follow on Twitter is not, ipso facto, "world-changing." However interesting this technological trick might be, the majority of the population has yet to see a good reason to be interested in Twitter. Another obvious problem: not everyone wants to be tracked, geographically. Therefore, anyone who applies the adjective "world-changing" to this kind of application deserves to be verbally smacked.

Another sure sign that someone isn't worth treating seriously, as a guru of a new technology, is an inability to talk about said technology without using argot. Most argots sound a lot like the arcane, impenetrable language of critical theory, an  academic movement with a high BS quotient that reached full blossom while I was in college. Based on the name of one of critical theory's founding figures, I'll use a neologism, Horkheimering, to describe this species of argot.

Horkheimering is pretty easy to spot. Many critical theorists Horkheimered to death very simple concepts, such the unsolvable philosophical conundrum, "Is the blue you see the blue I see?"

Here's some Horkheimering from a recent blog post about AR:

It's important to put AR in the context of how it functions in relation to other synthetically-oriented technology:

"Social Tesseractions assist in shaping contemporary notions related to Sociorelational information. Just as raw geophysical encounters evoke varying psychological and communicative responses [think: Communication Accommodation Theory], Tesseracting engenders similarly relevant synthetic loadings. In attempting to establish a conceptual structure surrounding Social Tesseractions, contemporary theorists display a pervasive tendency to shrink all synthetic interactions to a geophysical/biological endpoint. In order to establish whether Tesseraction can be considered a tangible phenomena, this assumed standard of endpoint interaction should shift from a reductionist angling towards more appropriate markers...."

Social Tesseraction is described in full at Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1 – a project that discusses ”...the formation and evolution of synthetic environments.”

While it made a good plot device for a couple of classic science fiction stories, I doubt that the mathematical concept of a tesseract is the only possible way to describe "sociorelational information." (I also have doubts about sociorelational, too.) However, the word tesseract is the ideal building block of argot:  obscure, technical, and oblique. Classic Horkheimering, to be sure, but how does these word games advance the adoption of a new technology?

Tr.im not fit

The URL shortening company Tr.im is closing its doors:

After a number of attempts to sell the service, no companies in the Twitter space stepped forward to purchase and operate it in its existing form. Says the company, "There is no way for us to monetize URL shortening -- users won't pay for it -- and we just can't justify further development since Twitter has all but annointed bit.ly the market winner."

Makes me wonder how many other cloud computing-esque, social media-ish services don't have a strong business model on their own, except if they're owned by one of the chief consumers of that service.

Announcing the Agile adoption survey

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.

All responses stay strictly confidential. If you're wondering what's in it for you, we'll provide you with a copy of the research, once Dave and I have finished writing it up. And please feel free to forward the link to other people who might take the survey.

[Cross-posted at The Forrester product management blog.]

And now, back to your regularly scheduled podcast

I really tried to get time to finish this week's Heretech podcast. Really, really tried. But it didn't happen. On Monday, we'll have the next exciting episode, in which Stefan Ried and I talk about cloud computing technological platforms and business models.

That was the week that was, part 2

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.

We see the effects of this IT to BT shift all the time. In a way, it's a congratulatory message to the technology industry: "Good for you! You've become an integral part of the lives and work of billions of people!" Unfortunately, that also means that the self-same billions who now rely on this technology have strong opinions about whether or not it works for them, and significant power to determine its purchase and adoption.

Many companies in the technology industry struggle to speak the business user's language. Some of them act like the "freaks and geeks" crowd hanging around the fringes of a high school dance, uncomfortable with talking to anyone outside their circle. Trying to make the astronomy club sound cool might not be worth the effort, particularly if you feel that you're doing fine with the crowd of people who already understand you. (By the way, I was in astronomy club, and it was pretty cool.)

Others might be more aggressive about discussing their favorite arcane pursuits, which may hold no appeal for most other people. Going out to the desert with your buddies, getting blind drunk, and chasing jackrabbits with your three-wheel ATVs might seem awesome to you, but not to the young woman you're trying to impress.

Unfortunately, you do need to explain the value of technology to people who might otherwise not care to hear it, even if it's the most "techie" of all technology. If there are no business benefits, then why should someone spend money on it?

I'll use the JSR-168 portal standard as an example. If you go to the web site of a vendor who supports this standard, chances are you'll find some relevant product marketing materials.  This finely-crafted material might be as gripping as the last season of The Wire...For a purely technical audience. Rarely will you find a statement of business value as straightforward as, If you buy technology that supports this standard, you'll spend less time training people on integration APIs, or maintaining your portal, etc.

And if you still think that the ability to speak in both business and technical terms is unnecessary for your product...Well, I guess you're a happier person than me, since you've probably missed the great economic implosion of the last year or so. Cling to your child-like innocence for as long as you can.

[Cross-posted at The Forrester product management blog.]

That was the week that was, part 1

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?

The results from this study put these differences in stark detail. I can't talk about the specific roles and professions from this research project, but I can give an unrelated (and fairly obvious) example. If you were to look at doctors and college seniors, you'd see major differences, not only in where they go (forums, social networking sites, etc.), but what they do while they're at this locations. In this kind of research, we combine the social media behavior profiles (official name: Social Technographics) constructed from surveys with follow-on research about the specific locations and activities. Doing this kind of research is no small amount of work, which is why I was pretty busy this week.

These demographic differences are often the culprit behind Social Media Disappointment Synrdome (SMDS). Sufferers of SMDS have created some company-sponsored social media outlet, such as a CEO blog or technical forum,  and then waited for people to show up...and waited...and waited...Of course, the source of SMDS, in many of these cases, is the lack of motivation for anyone to participate in these social media.

All of which shows why our social media methodologies--the larger POST strategy for the entire company, and the PLOT approach designed for inbound activities--make the technology an enabling detail, not the starting point of the strategy. Social media don't connect people; people connect people. Social media are just a powerful technology for making these connections. The contours and content of a particular social media outlet must be appropriate for the type of connections these people want to create.

Forrester colleague Oliver Young recently noted how the term Web 2.0 has quickly fallen out of fashion. That's probably a good thing, since Web 2.0 has more of a technological connotation than social media does. A small semantic difference—one phrase starts with Web, and the other with social—reflects a profound insight into who's using these new technologies, and why.

[Cross-posted at The Forrester product management blog.]

The cranky analyst?

Wow, he/she really is cranky.

A grave matter

Unfortunately, this will be my only useful contribution to the blog today.

I'm coming to the end of one of this week's major projects, for which I need some PowerPoint diagrams. After finishing several of them, I said to myself, "Man, I'm dead tired." At that moment, two unrelated thoughts had a head-on collision in my brain.

Thought #1: Product managers spend way too much time using PowerPoint. If they're building diagrams, they usually include boxes and arrows.

Thought #2: If you added up all the work in your adult life, PowerPoint diagrams will appear throughout. So, when you're dead (not just dead tired), why shouldn't your tombstone feature a pithy PowerPoint diagram for those who don't have the time to read the particulars of your life?

There's no reason why this approach to headstone usability should be limited to product managers, by the way. Yea, though I, like many other knowledge workers, walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me; thy bullet points and thy custom animation, they comfort me.

Personal social media slowdown

I'm slammed with work at the beginning of this week, so I may be a day or so late in getting the podcast finished and posted. You may also not see me posting all that much posting on the blog or  Twitter this week. I'll definitely get some wiggle room by Thursday.