Agile is taking off in the marketplace, and agile processes are the norm for helping IT departments deliver great software… but what about the business? What about the product manager? What about the software itself? What can we do to ensure that we build the RIGHT software with the RIGHT features… the features that will make us the MONEY!
This session will introduce the concepts of Business Value Metrics and Customer-Based Design a simple formula to help Business Stakeholders evaluate their application feature by feature to ensure they are building the MONEY (honey.)

Successful software products deliver a set of features your customers’ value and will pay for. To determine the correct priority and presentation of features, it’s important to understand the different behaviors and attitudes that exist in the audience for your product. Ethnographic field research is very valuable, yet can be expensive, time consuming and require skilled researchers. In this hands-on workshop, you will learn how to use collaborative play with customers to discover how they think and what they value, and use this intelligence effectively with your agile teams.

When charting new territory–-enterprise-scale Agile–-traditional roadmaps only take you so far. When landscapes change in weeks, product management must find a way to reconcile sprint plans and backlogs from multiple teams with longer-term product direction. David Wilby, SVP of Products at Borland, shares how his teams tackled the roadmap challenge during Borland’s Agile transformation. He’ll cover how roadmaps became a barrier to scaling Agile, how his teams adopted Agile roadmapping, the challenges, and the impact the new practices have had on Borland’s Agile transformation.

Learn how the Corporate Internet Solutions group at Nationwide Insurance found creative ways to manage the competing and vague priorities of corporate silos by incorporating ideation into the portfolio pipeline. As the connection point between otherwise disconnected corporate entities, the Product Owner team adapted the Scrum process to better manage 17 dependent projects, reluctant internal business partners, and suspicious methodologists, by articulating clear Pre-Discovery activities, RITE usability testing, scenario planning, and kanban in the quest for continuous flow.

Over the life of a product, Product Owners maintain an ever-evolving Product Backlog. As features rise in rank, the PO breaks them down into stories, eventually sized small so the team can deliver increments of valuable functionality in an iteration. In this tutorial, we will explore examples of how to evolve a product backlog from vision to iteration acceptance. Participants will practice breaking stories down, with an emphasis on understanding the considerations that guide that process. We will provide several examples from different types of projects/products.

When Marriott began to build its brand management intranet, the tech vendor ran into several problems that jeapardized the whole program. The introduction of Agile began a long recovery process: When should you be be covert/overt with Agile practices? How do you convince stakeholders a daily concall is more efficient than a weekly concall? Why would you pay for the tech vendor’s Agile training? How do you structure Firm Fixed pricing to be Agile?

This is the story of how applying Agile techniques, first covertly, then out in the open, slowly steered the ship on course.

As more development teams adopt agile, product managers must change the way they work to keep up with faster development cycles and shorter customer feedback loops. Product managers new to agile soon realize that agile processes require more involvement from their group. Given that most product managers are already overworked, how can they manage these new activities to derive more value from software projects and products? I will share my experience transitioning to Agile, pitfalls to avoid and propose solutions to the new challenges that arise.

Effective management of a software portfolio is a challenge that many companies ignore, avoid or fail to follow through because it is too hard. Many approaches to portfolio management get so complex that decisions fail to get made. In this hands-on tutorial we explore “barely sufficient” portfolio management and introduce a simulation game where participants make decisions about which investments a company makes. Participants will learn about product, project, and portfolio management issues tying decisions to strategy and purpose in order to optimize overall return.

The biggest risk to most projects is building the wrong product. Regardless of how fast your agile team becomes, nothing matters if you’re building the wrong product.

In this tutorial we will look at both non-financial ways of both prioritizing product backlog items and choosing among competing project ideas. Included are relative weighting, theme screening, theme scoring, and Kano analysis. You will leave with hands-on experience in very practical ways to prioritize a product backlog.

A huge quality-centered activity in Agile teams is defining “done-ness” as it relates to end of iteration or sprint deliverables. How we frame our team work goals, and measure their outcomes, plays an immense part in determining overall product quality and customer satisfaction. In this session, we examine the 4 levels of Done-ness when it comes to Agile Release Criteria:

1. Team Craftsmanship Patterns
2. Features – Complete
3. Iteration – Complete
4. Release – Ready

and share examples and stories of how Product Owners should interact with their teams.