Download - 5 new rules for product development

5 New Rulesfor Product Development

Tuesday, September 24, 13

Emerging trends

• i’m going to be chatting about emerging trends we’re seeing across our engagements and in the industry that speak to the new way software products are getting made.


Pat SheridanCEO, Modus Create

@sheridap


Artbecomes SciencebecomesEngineering


Art

“ART” refers to people in any given field of practice innovating better ways of working through necessity and trial and error.


Science

“Science” refers to best practices getting codified over time, being given names, and becoming widely accepted standards for the ‘right way” to get work done.

For Software products I think about the evolution from waterfall to iterative to agile development as the maturity from Art to Science.


Enginering

“Engineering” refers to the maturity of these solutions into patterns, systems, and even products.

The maturity of tools for test driven development and continuous integration and products for agile management as the engineering part.


The Times They are a Changin’


The Past 5 YearsFrom Virtualization to Cloud Based Services the introduction of mobile devices and the introduction HTML5 frameworks and micro-frameworks all speak to this change

The most striking to me is the speed at which this change has happened and continues to happen.

The pace of adoption for all of these innovations in the workplace continues to increase as well.

This holds a lot of promise for what the next five years will bring.


Tipping Point

2010 2015

Today


Tipping Point

It’s not just the core technologies that are evolving quickly. It’s the ways that engineers work and are being managed

More importantly ITS THE WAY NON TECHNICAL BUSINESS folks work and are being managed.


Tipping Point

These effect of these changes makes for better products, developed more quickly, by productive (and hopefully happier) developers.

Take take advantage of these changes, as Steve Jobs would say, we need to think differently.

As large companies struggle to formalize innovation, they are studying companies like Apple and they’re studying startups with the idea that by doing so they can incorporate new ideas and new approaches to work into their day to day business.


1 Embrace the New Stack


Embrace the New Stack

Recognize the future is now. Advancements to client-side development are just the tip of the iceberg.

It’s easier than ever today to create amazing HTML5 user experiences.

But those UIs depend on a robust server side services deliver content and functionality at an increasing pace.


Future StackWe’re are very familiar with Service oriented architecture and RESTful API development that allow developers to write less code, or better said, to write more business value /feature code.

The days of writing and maintaining internal proprietary frameworks should be put to bed.

It’s taking less and less convincing to show clients they don’t need to continue to develop and maintain these home grown and brittle frameworks.


IaaS

PaaSCross-app Services

App Services

SaaS

Leverage Cloud Stack


Cloud ArchitectureIaaS•servers, storage

PaaS•APIs/SDKs, elastic Scaling, Database, Runtime Environments, Scheduling and load balancing•Security & Compliance, MDM,, Risk Mgmt, Threat detection, Anti-virus

Cross-app services - Cloud integration, USer ID mgmt, Rules & Policy, System and app management.


Cloud Architecture

App ServicesCollaboration, Content, Process, BI/Analytics, eCommerce

SaaS- Productivity, HR, Finance, Customer Service, Marketing, Sales, Collaboration

In general, the idea is not to have to maintain and support are your critical dev infrastructure from inside your building.

And the same goes for the software team itself.


2 - Glocal Teams


‘Glocal’ Teams“Glocal” means Global & Local.

As the world continues to get flatter through technology, it’s likely your potential customers could be in any country, speaking any language, and that the sun may never set on your business.

Your engineering talent should be no different if you want to be best suited to compete in a global market.

Developers should be an integrated expertise in the product team.

Years of businesses optimizing for low cost development has put considerable barriers of communication and attitude between business and technology.

To identify and retain the best talent for your team, you should be configuring to support multi-timezone developments.


Developers != Resources

To give you an example, Last year we worked on a large scale app for the UK with developers in timezones from Japan, all over the US, UK, Netherlands, India, and even Tanzania.

There is a global race for talent. In today’s world having a team comprised of 1 or 2 developers in multiple cities, can easily outperform much larger teams in one remote location.

It also enables you to support multiple clients in multiple timezones with a personal human connection as well.

The collaboration tools are only getting better: from Skype, GoToMeeting, Google Hangout, Hipchat, web based project management tools and UX/prototyping tools are making this possible.


3 Platforms over Products



A single product mindset can often be too limiting.

When you focus on developing a platform, you can enable a partner ecosystem on top of your offering.

Great products focus on providing the most seamless user experience possible to the end user.

But Increasingly customers want full api access to any SaaS based solutions they buy so that they can customize and integrate data and workflow seamlessly into other parts of their business.



In many cases, unique requirements exists across the customer base that make it hard to build one user experience or feature-set to anticipate all customer needs.

So how do we handle this dilemma?

We already see this with business apps like Salesforce, Quickbooks, and Intuit, and all the major carriers are providing entire dev api’s to encourage robust marketplaces are being built on top of the core features provided.

I just recently noticed that even Spotify is exposing an API to enable a custom music apps store within the Spotify app.


Stop Repeating the Past

Hopefully you’ve all seen this cartoon, and unfortunately we’ve all lived through one of these kinds of projects in our careers.

Historically, a lack of ‘shared understanding’ in software projects has led to poorly defined, poorly managed, and poorly executed failures.


4 Apply Agile to Your Business


Lean product Dev

So how to we prevent the mistakes of the past? The Lean Startup Methodology offers a path forward.

The Build – Measure – Learn approach focuses on an almost scientific method for validating assumptions about what features customers want before writing a line of code.

The best practices of agile are now being applied to the business itself.

Good tech managers realize that engineering is not a black box and that maintaining a shared understanding across the team is the single biggest risk reducing factor on large projects.

An even worse failure is building a technically great app that no one wants to use.

Many times its up to the development team to advocate, educate, and enforce agile practices on your business colleagues.


Lean product Dev

Core Concepts of the ‘Lean startup’ Methodology:

• Product Market Fit

• Customer Validation

• Minimum Viable Product

• Vanity Metrics


Lean Startup

The Lean Startup methodology is getting worldwide attention and create discipline and accountability on the business to make the best use of development time and get the right product to market faster.

Get involved!


Lumberg’s days are numbered.Tuesday, September 24, 13

Lean Startup Machine

LSM is a three day intensive bootcamp that forces aspiring entrepreneurs and technologists to “fail fast and fail often”.

All before ever writing a line of code.


Lean Startup Machine

Teams define and redefine their app ideas, rapidly exploring the problem and solution space, experiment on solution design prototypes and validating with real user feedback.

This kind of ‘iterate’ the business idea first approach is setting new and better expectations on the business to better confirm idea are worth building, before committing development time and money.


Validation BoardAt the core of Lean Startup Machine approach is the Validated Learning Board.

and the main aspects of this approach are starting to be used by large companies, to get away from the volumes of documentation of the past, that was more often wrong than right to begin with.

Customer and product Hypothesis are identified and iterated against.

Core Assumptions are identified and tested with experiments.

and feedback from ‘real people’ is gotten, often on the street.


Agile + LeanImprovements to the way requirements are identified and documented are being accompanied by ways to prioritize development work.

How many folks are using agile planning tools like Pivotal tracker?

The primary value from tools like Pivotal is to determine developer Velocity as a key metric for understanding the pace of feature development.

Pivotal is great for identifying and scoping user stories, but not such a great job on helping determine which stories to build first.

For that we need something else.


5 Business Weight Your Stories



We’re all familiar with story point sizing schemes from simple ones like “easy, medium, hard” 1-3, 1-5 pts (or “T-Shirt sizing” as some call it), to more complex schemes like Fibonacci sizing.

At best, these sizing techniques identify potential risk and complexity in the engineering work.



When done right, this helps development teams stay honest about estimations (and calibrating estimations at the end of a sprint).

But to answer Why this feature? or Why now? We need a business value weighting.

If you think about a product as a self funding effort, then you need a mechanism to identify the right time and sequence for building each feature.



User Experience Weight – will this feature measurably add value to the customer experience?

Revenue Weight– is there defined revenue opportunity associated with this feature?-- has a customer asked for it and willing to pay for feature acceleration in the roadmap?-- is a deal dependent on closing b/c of this feature?-- [more likely] has a sales guy already sold that this feature exists?


5 New Rules

1. Embrace the ‘New’ Stack

2. Build ‘Glocal’ Teams

3. Build Platforms over Products

4. Apply Agile to the Business

5. Add ‘Business Weighting’ to Stories


thanks!

@sheridap


Download - 5 new rules for product development

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