Luke Hohmann presentation at Insight Forum. Provided concrete tools and concepts for collaborating with internal and external stakeholders to create better products

1. Collaboration Tools to
Create Better Products
Insight Forum
April 21, 2009
Motivated from Within®

2. About Luke Hohmann
• Founder/CEO of Enthiosys
– Agile Product Management consulting
– Customer needs, roadmaps, business model
– Product management mentoring and training
• Agile product guy
– VP Bus Dev (Aladdin), VP Eng &Product Dev’t
(Aurigin), VP Systems Eng (EDS Fleet Services)
– Board of Agile Alliance
• Author, speaker, blogger
– “Innovation Games”
– “Beyond Software Architecture”
– “Journey of the Software Professional”
– agile PM blog at www.Enthiosys.com
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3. Goals
1. Provide two concrete tools that can help you
collaborate with internal and external
stakeholders to create better products
2. Either have fun or get done
What
3. Practical advice to
did I
help you succeed forget?
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4. Agenda
• Requirements  Solutions negotiation
through design continuums
• Prioritization through Buy a Feature
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5. The way it is supposed to work
Business / Prod Mgt Dev / Engineering
Responsible for: Responsible for:
1. Setting priorities 1. Estimating size
2. Defining market needs 2. Keeping metrics
3. Marchitecture 3. Tarchitecture
4. ROI/Profitability 4. Quality Built In
Shared Responsibilities
1. Roadmap
2. Releases
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6. The way it often works
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7. Why the challenge?
• “How do I know what I mean until I see what I
say?”
-- Karl Weick
• “On the inevitable intertwining of specification and
implementation”
-- Balzer and Swartout
• “Business choices enable and constrain
technology choices and vice versa”
-- Hohmann
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8. Design Continuums
• A set of design alternatives
– Typically goes from minimal to ultimate future state
– Used to add temporality to a design process
– Used to clarify and structure bus-dev collaboration
– An essential part of concurrent engineering
practices at companies like Toyota Motor
Company
Camera Phones
16-bit 16-bit 256 Digital Movie Optical
B&W Color Color Zoom Mode Zoom
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9. Why Design Continuums?
They Help!
• PMs by letting them start with a solution and
work back to the goal
• Dev by keeping design options open until the
“last responsible moment”
• Empowers the team by structuring
communications
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10. Design Continuum Process
• Start with a business problem
– May not be well formed
– May have a suggested implementation
• Create a set of design choices
• Create a set of attributes and criteria to help
you choose the best set of design choices
• Prepare a trade-off matrix
• Iterate and negotiate on the course of action
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11. Example Trade-off Matrix
Design Design Design
Option 1 Option 2 Option 3
Criteria 1
Criteria 2
Criteria 3
Great Good Acceptable Un-acceptable
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12. Example
• You are working on a browser-based hosted
medical records system
• Registered medical workers (doctors and
nurses) currently access system through a
userid and password
• PM wants to provide support for end-user
access to their personal medical records
• PM thinks the right approach is to create a
new class of “registered users”
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13. Discussion
Possible designs: What are some ways you
could solve this problem?
Attributes & criteria: Create a set of attributes
and criteria to help you
choose the best set of
design choices
Evaluate: Prepare a trade-off matrix
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14. Trade-off Matrix of Alternatives
Great Good Acceptable Un-acceptable
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15. Agenda
• Requirements  Solutions negotiation
through design continuums
• Prioritization through Buy a Feature
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16. Prioritization Pitfalls
use case Common Approach Problems
bug fix
Single expert Do they have the knowledge and
arch change
trust of the organization to make the
hard choices?
do this
Small groups Tradeoffs are not clear
do that
Large groups Insufficient tools!
the other thing
Where is the
“infinite” backlog “Voice of the Customer?
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17. Some Techniques
Face to Face Interactions Online Interactions
• Innovation Games® • Innovation Games®
Same Buy a Feature Buy a Feature
Time 20/20 Vision Prune the Product Tree
Prune the Product Tree
• Joint spreadsheet ranking • Joint spreadsheet ranking
Shared State (physical) Shared State (electronic)
• Innovation Games® • Innovation Games®
Different Prune the Product Tree Prune the Product Tree
Time • Project boards • Wiki’s
• Commenting systems
• email / workflow
Same Place Different Place
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18. Innovation Game® Buy a Feature
• A list of 12-20 items (features or projects)
are described in terms of benefits and cost
• 5 to 8 invited stakeholders given
limited “budget”, must reach
consensus on projects to “buy”
• Captures very rich information about
customer motivations, trade-
offs, objections, actual collective needs
In-person
• Provides rich opportunity for “new” ideas
Online
• Captures data for sophisticated analysis of
Goal:
preferences
Prioritize
• Preliminary trials indicate faster/more
Product Backlogs /
accurate results than traditional tools
Project Portfolios
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19. Buy A Feature Online - Preparing
A list of features with
prices. This example
is for product
concepts for a pair of
internet sunglasses
Games can be
played multiple
times to get
preferences
among different
groups
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20. Buy A Feature Game Play
Highly desired items
Participants.
are purchased.
Participant bids.
An integrated chat facility
enables you to understand
participant motivations.
Here, we learn that
participants dislike learning a
rental car’s navigation
system.
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21. Buy A Feature Online - Results
Results of many
games
played, sorted
by number of
times
purchased.
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22. Parties, Galas, and
Tournaments
What is it? Who plays? Facilitated? Number Number of
of players?
Items?
A “dinner
Party You select and Yes 12..20 5..8
party”. control
participants
An “open
Gala Random No 12..20 9+
seating participants
event” based on a
shared URL
Tournament A You control and Yes 20+ Based on
combination select number of
of parties! participants items and
number of
tournaments
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23. Tournament Structure
15 7
1
14 7
4
45 15 7 14 7
5
2
15 7
3
List of
projects
Each dark square Each light square represents
14 7
the “winning” projects
represents one game
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24. Case Study:
VeriSign Global Customer Support
Context 46 projects ranging from small to very large.
Problem The VeriSign leadership needed to quickly identify the high-
priority, most globally supported projects.
Engagement VeriSign project managers prepared the portfolio for the
games. Enthiosys structured the process into three
Profile
tournaments involving 60% of the global customer care
organization and facilitated the games.
• Very clear separation of the “winning” projects – the
Results
original list of 46 was prioritized to the top 5 projects
• High degrees of collaboration – even when collaboration
was not required to purchase an project!
• Participant chat logs provided detailed explanations
behind the bidding – the meaning behind the choice.
• Participants considered the process fun.
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25. http://buyafeature.com/game_view
/lobby/JNX335LGW24J
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26. Thank You !!!
I’d love to hear from you! Contact me at:
Luke Hohmann
Founder & CEO
Enthiosys, Inc.
cell: (408) 529-0319
www.enthiosys.com
lhohmann@enthiosys.com
Innovation Through Understanding®
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