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Product Camp Toronto 2011 – Vignettes

Michael Sahota — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 13:38:58 +0000

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:

Innovation Games at Product Camp 2011

View more presentations from Michael Sahota

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

Summary

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

Facilitation We offer three types of facilitation: Understanding Customers using Innovation...

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Sustaining Agility Game

Michael Sahota — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 11:36:10 +0000

Have you been on a software project where each release gets harder and harder? Many projects fall into the tar pit of the Design Dead Core.

Why do nearly all software projects fail to balance short term choices with long term consequences?

Through game-play you will experience how hard it is to make effective choices. Game learnings will be tied into well-known models in and beyond software such as Technical Debt, Stephen Covey’s Production Capability, and Alistair Cockburn’s theory of competing games.

Recipe

Game Objective: Participants experience the attraction of short-term thinking and feel the long-term consequences. The game helps executives and managers understand the importance of investment in sustainable development practices. The game is intended to help them get through a Red Pill, Blue Pill moment.
Number of participants: 6 to 50 (Has been playtested with 40 at XP Toronto User Group Meeting).
Team size: 3 to 5 people per team.
Duration: 90 to 110 minutes
Materials: Game cards (can print or write by hand), pennies (15 per team), dice (two per team)
Setup: (optional) video projector, tables for group work, whiteboard or flipchart.
Credits: This game was created by Alistair McKinnell and Michael Sahota.

Session Timetable

Intro & Motivate Game [3 min]
Break into teams of four or five people. [2 min]
Setup Game [5 min]
Year 1 [30+ min]
Year 2 [20+ min]
Year 3 [15 min]
Debrief [15 min]

There is a backdrop story that motivates the game situation and is used throughout the game to provide entertainment and inject new rules.

What’s Your Choice?

Here is a photo showing the project choices available to management teams:

Game Narrative

You’re working at a large organization. (Although situation entirely applies to smaller companies). Your goal in this game is to get promoted within your organization through delivery excellence. You need 50 Career Points to get promoted. You’ll keep track of your Career Points as the game progresses.

Together with the other people on your team, you form the management team of a software development division. Your team is competing with other teams to get promoted.

[Handout Steady and Fast Cards and Scoring Sheet]
[Each steady project generates $3M revenue. Each fast project generates $4M revenue.]

[Optional Colour: You have two strategies that you can follow for any one of the projects in your project portfolio: (1) negotiate with the development organization and let them influence the deadlines; or (2) pressure the development organization to deliver to meet this quarter's business targets. You may choose a hybrid of these strategies for your project portfolio: running some of your projects with a steady, negotiated delivery pace and some of your projects with a fast delivery pace.]

Year One

Turn 1: Q1
Start of Turn: We are going to walk you through the first turn.
Allocation: You can fund 10 projects. When you take over the following strategy is already in place: 8 steady projects and 2 fast projects.
Scoring: Calculate revenue.
Calculate change in Career Points. Calculate cumulative Career Points.

[Each quarter, you get 1 Career Point for every $1M revenue over $28M and you lose 1 Career Point for every $1M revenue below $28M. You start with 12 Career Points. Need 50 Career Points to win]

Turn 2: Q2
Start of Turn: Your team has achieved more autonomy from the senior management team and you may choose whatever project delivery strategy you like.
Allocation: You can fund 10 projects. Choose an allocation strategy.
Scoring: as above.

Turn 3: Q3
Start of Turn: At the company town hall, your CEO shares her latest business thinking with the organization. Last quarter she attending a seminar based on The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and going forward she wants the organization to consider not just production but also production capacity.

Some consultants have been hired and have started to put in place some metrics around production capacity.

The consultants present a report to your management team. It turns out that projects that are designated for fast delivery appear to be lowering the development organization’s production capacity by one unit of production capacity for each fast project.

[Fill in last 4 columns to spreadsheet: Invest, Delta Production Capacity, Production Capacity, and Fundable Projects. You start with a production capacity of 105. Update these columns for the first two turns (Q1 and Q2).]

[Each fast project reduces production capacity by 1. You start with a production capacity of 105. The number of Fundable Projects is calculated by dividing your production capacity by 10 and rounding down.]

Explain Invest. Your management team has been given a new portfolio management strategy: in addition to delivering project using either a steady or fast delivery strategy you may also invest in projects to increase your delivery capacity.

Scoring:
[Each invest project generates an opportunity to gain production capacity by rolling a 1d6 where each pip is a unit of production capacity. ]

[In order to avoid getting fired you must meet satisfy these 3 conditions: (1) no more than 5 Career Points lost in any one quarter.; (2) never two quarters in a row with Career Points lost; and (3) never allow Career Points to go below zero.]

Turn 4: Q4
Start of Turn: The consultants present another report to your management team. It turns out that projects that are designated for steady delivery appear to be lowering the development organization’s production capacity as well.
[Reduce production capacity by one for every 4 projects (steady or fast) (rounded down).]

End of Turn: Audit Event. Each team requires two independent auditors from other teams to verify the calculations.

Game Events (Year 2)

Beginning of Q1: At the all-hands meeting to kickoff the New Year your CEO exhorts everyone to work harder and to stay focused on delivery. She announces that Agile software development is on her radar and to stay tuned.The senior management team has set a revenue target of $33M for this quarter.

[Rules: You must meet it or loose an additional 5 career points (usual Career Point loss limit is increased to 10 Career Points). THIS TURN ONLY]

Q2
Beginning of Q2: Your management team becomes aware that an Agile consulting firm has been hired to help the development organization transition to Scrum. [Possible rule: you must do at least 3 fast projects while you still can]

Q3
Beginning of Q3: At the company town hall, as usual, your CEO shares her latest business thinking with the organization. Pick one option:

Discuss design dead core and how it gets created. [3 min] (http://www.agilitrix.com/2010/02/inventors-dilemma-and-the-dead-core/)
Show Schwaber video [11 min] The lights are dimmed and she signals the Audio Visual guys to play the Design-Dead Core video presented by Ken Schwaber. [Ken http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyNPeTn8fpo&t=35m38s (to 45:07)]

Beginning of Q4: CEO announces that promotion criteria are under review and they are working on revised policies for Q1 that reflect the need for sustainable development.

Game Events (Year 3)

Beginning of Q1: At the company town hall, as usual, your CEO shares her latest business thinking with the organization.Agile consultant explains Alistair Cockburn’s model of Competing games (current/next): Current Project (bounded game) and Product/Company (unbounded game)

[Rule change: Promotion Criteria is now 35 Career Points and 13 Production]

[CFO: Teams that have very low production capacity can revert to original game starting conditions]

Debrief

Here is an example debrief using ORID (http://pacific-edge.info/orid/):

What did you notice during in the game?
What emotions did the game raise for you?
What does this mean for you and your organization?
What will you do with these learnings?

Resources

Sustaining Agility Game Options – PDF to print 3″ x 5″ index cards (one set per team)
Sustaining Agility Score Sheet – Excel spreadsheet to print (one sheet per team)

Facilitation Tips

It is useful to create memorable even stereotyped characters to help participants connect with the storyline. e.g. CEO has a Texan drawl, CFO is from NYC, Consultant is from California.
Write Rule fragments on flipchart or whiteboard so everyone can see the rules. I suggest skipping text and just put keywords such as “Invest –>+1D6 Production Capacity”.
If you have not played the game before, I suggest you playtest it on your own.
It may be helpful to write up rules on flipchart in advance and then share them when it is time.

Feedback from first run (XPToronto)

“Fantastic, Magical” – Jorgen Baker
“Real pressures bottled up” – Alex Aitken
“Good fun, valuable, opportunity to learn” – Tom Huras
“Thought-provoking, Fun, Interesting” – Nick Faulkener
“Lively, Interactive, Team-focused” – Hedi Buchner

Feedback from second run (Agile Games 2011)

“This game relates hugely to my current work situation where we struggle daily to do thing the right way or increase our technical debt. This game can give great insight to our companies leader to make the right decisions as much as possible.” – A.F.
“Very interesting game. I’m going to try it myself.” – A.J.
“Good mix of presentation and game. Provided great thoughts about career goals, revenue and investing in production capability and the future.” – J.V.
“Great, practical game about strategy and the impact of long-term choices and short-term consequences” – T.M.

How to Facilitate a Great Game Debrief Ilja Preuß ran a peer workshop at Play4Agile on Tips...

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Innovation Games® Workshop? Awesome!

Michael Sahota — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 20:14:59 +0000

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.

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Serious Games! Check out the box!

Michael Sahota — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 04:54:43 +0000

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

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Biggest bang for the buck! Strategies to organize & prioritize your backlog

Michael Sahota — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 22:20:56 +0000

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)

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

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

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

Biggest bang for the buck! Strategies to organize & prioritize your backlog

View more presentations from Michael Sahota.

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Strategies for Effectively Managing Legacy Systems

Michael Sahota — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 22:48:43 +0000

Derek Longmuir presented ThoughtWorks QTB on working with legacy systems. You can see the video and slides on InfoQ.

I like the definition given by Michael Feathers:

Legacy code is simply code without tests.

Legacy Systems have Value. They are usually business critical and feature rich. They may even be stable and reliable (YMMV). Hint: in the MindMap below, start at 3 o’clock and go clockwise.

Why change from a legacy system? There are number of good reasons: obsolete technology, can’t add features, system is fragile.

This is an important problem since most systems we have 10% of the effort to build and 90% effort to maintain. So to manage costs, we need maintainable systems.

What to do? Traditional approaches such as Big Bang (think explosion) and wrapping/hiding legacy systems rarely achieve business objectives.

Do a system health check. Look at the code. Get complexity measures. Look at test code ratio. What state is the system in?

Before getting started, there are some tools that you will need for basic technical hygiene. The equivalent of brushing and flossing your teeth is test and build automation.

How to tackle this?

With the Strangler approach, the goal is to strangle the existing application by building a new system that runs in parallel. The idea is to put a new interface in place and begin migrating the functionality in a piecewise fashion. This approach takes a lot of effort and makes sense when there is no hope for the existing code base.

The Phased approach is about rehabilitating the system piece by piece. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

Strangely, there was no mention of the bible on this topic: Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers. This book is a must-read on this topic. As is Refactoring, Refactoring to Patterns, and Clean Code.

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Aligning and Balancing your Backlog

Michael Sahota — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 22:26:25 +0000

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:

Align with Company Strategy
Balance stakeholder demands
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.

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Inventors Dilemma and the Dead Core

Michael Sahota — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 13:32:27 +0000

Ken Schwaber has a great presentation where he talks about the Innovator’s Dillemma and how companies build a (design) dead core.

A typical (success) story

Management – we need to hit the date.
Developers – OK, we’ll cut quality but won’t tell you.
Success! We made the date. We’re heroes!

BUT, this is a horrible long term strategy because you get a design-dead core and can no longer ship product.

Design-dead core

Do you have a design-dead core? Here’s a quick checklist (see mindmap below):

The code is fragile: difficult to work with and things break unpredictably
Little or no automated test harness.
Few experts who really understand the technology.

Innovator’s Dilemma

The purported dilemma is that you need to choose between fast delivery and maintainability. So, if you want to get to market fast you need to take shortcuts that are going to hinder you in the long run.

This is also called the inventor’s dilemma.

Agile to the Rescue

Teams that follow Agile practices avoid this peril in two ways.

By managing features and scope, teams can find the most valuable software to deliver by a certain date.

Technical practices such as automated testing, continuous integration and refactoring keep a code base healthy and maintainable. They also helps teams go faster.

Release Burndown to illustrate the Innovator’s Dilemma

Consider the chart below. Companies start at burndown line A. If they use Agile, they will stay there. Most companies don’t. So, release by release, they accumulate technical debt and the code base decays. After a few years, they build a design-dead core.

As a coach, I like to show teams the chart below and vote on their code base. Many companies are at line C with some area’s that are D.

Help! I have a dead core!

OK, so you’ve got a dead core. Sad news. There are ways to recover. I’d suggest you start with Michael Feather’s book Working Effectively with Legacy Code.

Watch the video

The whole video is great, but for the part explaining the Innovator’s dilemma check out:

Start: 35:38
Stop: 45:07

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