I am heading off to Agile 2011 and I wanted to share why I am really excited to be attending.  It’s really all about the power of play.

Understanding Flow through Games

I was fortunate to be accepted to the Agile Bootcamp track to present Lean Fundementals: Understanding Flow through games. I am thrilled since this touches on two passions of mine – Lean/Flow thinking and using games for learning.

Strategic Play® with Lego® for Solving Serious Problems

I am going to run two open jam sessions (each with a maximum of 14 participants) to use  Strategic Play® with Lego®  to solve some serious problems or build a shared vision. I will announce the times via twitter (follow-me) and also using the open jam board.

One of these will be focussed on generating leadership ideas for the Scrum Alliance. Some example acceptance tests for leadership are:

• There is a clear compelling vision of the Scrum Alliance that is supported by 70% of the membership.
• Satisfaction with leadership in Scrum Alliance is high. (e..g more than 4 out of 5 on survey).
• Public perception of the Scrum Alliance is positive.
• Members feel like their voice is heard regarding key decisions.

Innovation Games® T-Shirt Contest

You probably already know that Innovation Games® are amazingly powerful for supporting Product Owner/Manager communication and discovery with customers and stakeholders.

What you may not know is that there is a game at Agile 2011 for promoting awareness about Innovation Games® using a photo contest. Get your picture with me and other trained facilitators to win cold hard cash. I am very excited to participate and am bringing my two t-shirts. See front and back below. Sadly, my new tshirt did not get here in time…

Tasty Cupcakes – Game on!

I have been working with Mike McCollough and Don McGreal to accelerate tastycupcakes.org as the destination site to find and share games for learning about Agile and for games that do valuable work.

Games provide a way for people to play to get outstanding business results or accelerated learning.  Spot me wearing a TastyCupcakes tshirt and I’ll help you find the game for you!

Coach’s Corner

As a Certified Scrum Coach I thought I would pay it forward by participating in the Coach’s Corner to help coaches.

If you were thinking that this is not about play or games, well either you are right or life itself is a game. A collaborative one.

My office hours are:

• Monday 8am-9am
• Thursday 5pm to 7pm
• Friday 8am-9am

Product Camp Toronto was above all a great networking opportunity since there were lot’s of breaks between sessions for conversation. The day started with people sitting at tables chatting – and boy was there a buzz!

In this post I am going to give a quick pass at the four sessions I was at:

• Keynote on what is a product manager
• How to treat Customers like a Market and Markets like a Customer
• Open forum on Crowd Sourcing
• Market Research with Innovation Games

 What is a Product Manager?

The short answer is: someone who makes choices on product every day. John Stetic used the graphs below to show the breadth of skill required for product management and walked through some of the archetypal product managers and where they shine.

How to treat Customers like a Market and Markets like a Customer

Nick Van Weerdenburg had an engaging and insightful session. For me, the most engaging concept is to conceptualize a market as a person. Really ask yourself – what are they like? Personality? What do they think of you? Do they know your product? Good stuff. Read more below.

Open Forum on Crowd-Sourcing

I offered to facilitate this session (since I am getting pretty good at facilitation) and there was no one else around. As it turned out, we had a great mix of curiousity, skepticism and practical knowledge.

At the end there seemed to be consensus that:

Crowd Sourcing is a valuable activity that makes the Product Manager’s life easier, results in a better product and all this with minimal additional workload.

Below is a summary of the Crowd-Sourcing Flow:

Market Research with Innovation Games

Like crowd-sourcing, Innovation Games®are a powerful way of connecting with customers. The main difference is that Innovation Games® are focussed on real-time collaborative games as a means of engaging customers and stakeholders to reveal what really matters to them and to get breakthrough ideas.

I ran the session to give people an idea about using in-person and online games support envisioning, identifying hidden needs, and prioritization. We also briefly played Buy A Feature game online – and there were more than a few people hooked on it.

Slides are below:

Also, for reference, here is the handout summarizing the games:

Summary

I had a great day a Product Camp and would definitely recommend it.

For me, 2010 was a year for attending many conferences but I only did one planned training session – Innovation Games® Master Course with Luke Hohmann – and it was awesome.

I am writing this post to share with you a little of what happened. Below is a photographical tour of the 2 day workshop. You can click on the images to see a higher resolution image.

It all started with name cards

Who knew what a fun activity this could be? It’s not everyday that I get to use glitter glue …

Never enough wall space

With interaction knobs turned to “11″, the walls were covered with Big Visible Charts or Information Radiators. Note for Agile teams – you can never have enough wall space. A projector was only used for a little bit on the second day.

Grow the Product Tree

Grow the Product Tree is a variant of Prune the Product Tree where the participants create all the leaves. So no pruning, only growing. This is how to play the game if you want to generate lots of options.

Luke Explaining

Luke spent a lot of time telling war stories about using games. For me this was great. Lot’s of learning and gems. In the photo below we were discussing running parties and galas in online games.

Spider Web for Financial Services Product

Big paper = Big Ideas! Map out how your product interacts with related products.

When and where to Use Games

Here we see what games might be played to support a team at various points in the planning horizon. For example, at the strategy level, we might want to answer the question “What is our BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal)?” and we might use the game Product Box to help answer this.

Same but for Product Development Lifecyle. For example, after the release of a product, we might want to answer the question “What do customers like about the product?” and we might use the game Show and Tell to help answer this.

The above diagrams show that all you need is an image and you can create a brand new game.

Where to find out more?

You can find out about the different Innovation Games® here.

Here is the way one way to see Innovation Games® (Click for hi-res image).

The diagram came out out Luke Hohmann’s Innovation Games® Master class in September. In my search for order, I decided there were three main categories of innovation games:

1. Generative – for generating new product ideas
2. Prioritizing – understanding relative priorities of different features
3. Understanding Product Use – all about how customers use the product today

In the diagram I have bucketed each game in it’s primary category. The one that resists this classification is Prune the Product Tree which can be very unstructured and generative (participants write features) or highly structured and used for prioritization (features are pre-selected). It all depends on who writes the leaves.

There are also other perspectives for viewing the games. Check out the book for perspectives based on prep time, scalability, etc. Another good resources is this one page summary of all the games.

A big thanks to Luke Hohmann for sharing the images under creative commons license.

For those of you who follow the Agile Games Google group, you may already be aware of my proposal to create a Serious Games Stage at Agile 2011. The initial title concept was Agile Game stage, but then based on feedback from the list, I read about Serious Games and realized that this title fits the bill.

This week I finally get to learn a ton of useful information at Luke Hohmann’s Innovation Games® for Consultants class. So when we got a chance to do Product Box, I picked the Serious Games Stage as my product.  Below are photos of the product box I created as well as a lightning talk (video) where I sell it (You may want to up the resolution to 720p when viewing).

I have also posted a proposal for the Serious Games stage.

2 minute Lightning Talk

The Product Box

Here are the slides and reference links for the session Gino Marckx and I are giving at Agile 2010 in August

Triangle Model

Selecting and delivering the most important work is a critical success factor in Agile projects. But how do you know what is important? Unless you are psychic, some help would come in handy. Consider the diagram below to help make sense of the wide variety of strategies and tools.

We explain three different perspectives: Company, Customer, Team.

Team Perspective

The product backlog needs to be structured so that it informs the team of the vision and the work. Whenever the company or the customer priorities are not clear, the team will need to rely on general information and it’s common sense.

Theme Scoring & Screening - Relative or numerical weighting based on criteria (Mike Cohn)

• Video of Mike Cohn at Agile 2008 and Slides
• Agile Estimation and Planning (book)

Story Map – structure the work in a grid that reflects actual product usage (Jeff Patton)

• Jeff Patton’s blog
• Presentation

Software By Numbers – prioritize work by Net Present Value of Minimum Marketable Feature

• Software By Numbers (book)

Customer Perspective

The product backlog prioritization is done from the customer’s perspective, from the perspective of whoever is paying for the product in the first place, whether this customer is internal or external to the company doesn’t really matter. What is most valuable to the customer will be on top. Techniques focussing of this view require strong product domain knowledge, and a good understanding of the impact of specific features on the business.

Kano Analysys - Structured Questionaire to determine feature relevance: Mandatory, Linear, Exciter

• See materials of Mike Cohn from Team Perspective: Theme Scoring & Screening

Innovation Games® - 12 Games to better understand your product and what’s important (Luke Hohmann)

• For Speedboat® and Buy A Feature® + more - innovationgames.com and Book

Company Perspective

Companies need to find a balance in distributing the effort over multiple customers and/or products. But they also need to take the company and product strategies into account, deprioritizing features that might be very valuable for customers but aren’t in line with the company’s vision. As well, this takes into account stakeholders other than customers and sales – support, professional services, etc.

Company and Stakeholder Strategy

• Aligning and Balancing Your Backlog
• Blog: Why Prioritizing Your Product Backlog for ROI Doesn’t Work

Business Value Game – Simulation to illustrate how organizations can define their own business value model.

• Game instructions

Allocation Model - helpful to balance priorities with divergent or competing interests

• See example by Alisson Vale: Slides 40-49

Where to go from here?

The most common questions we have gotten after presenting these techniques are “How do I decide where to start?” and “How do these work together?”

These are complementary techniques and are used to solve related problems. Our recommendation is to start with the area that is the biggest challenge for your project. Maybe this means talking to stakeholders you normally don’t talk to. Maybe it means putting a Story Map up on the wall. It depends.

Slides

This is a review of Luke Hohmann’s excellent blog series on Product Backlog Prioritization. As usual, I have captured what I believe to be the salient points in a visual note.  The main points are to:

1. Align with Company Strategy
2. Balance stakeholder demands
3. Drive Profit

Starting at the top left and going clockwise…

Company Strategy.  Do you know what it is?  Do you know the top 3 priorities. Do you know the product strategy? As product owners, we want to eliminate the work that does not align with these. We also want to focus on those that are most strongly aligned with strategy.

Software By Numbers is a great concept but is difficult to use in practice. Firstly, no one has then numbers and secondly business value models need to account for intangibles.

Driving PROFIT is one aspect of a healthy model. Several different approaches (customer pipeline, market research, etc) can be used to identify key business drivers. Hohmann argues that these are at the theme or epic level rather than an MMF (minimum marketable feature).

Finally, it is critical that product releases satisfy internal and external stakeholders. For me, this is perhaps the deepest insight in this blog. Product owners need to listen to and support a wide constituency for a product to reach its potential value to an organization. In my work as a coach, I sadly notice internal stakeholders such as architecture, support and services are frequently ignored. If you haven’t already used them, Innovation Games® are a great way to understand and make choices.