This was presented at Product Camp Austin 11 on July 22, 2013 (http://productcampaustin.org/sessions/proposed-sessions/) Congratulations--you're a Product Manager who is part of a team that finally achieved many of the benefits promised by agile methods such as Scrum or Kanban--you have a ranking of work items on which the team can focus, you're eliminating waste, and you're getting things done (just about) on time! There may be an effort to put nearly everyone in your product development team (especially anyone in development) in the system and really crank up the velocity. However, you've noticed that the flow of new ideas coming out of development is not quite what it once was. You say to yourself, "at least it's better than before when they made ALL the decisions. But my competitors are catching up..." Come to this session to learn about a bold potential solution that will allow for a balance of predictable performance and the generation of innovative ideas from your development team.

1. Product Camp Austin 11
July 19, 2013
Matt Roberts
matt@mat t - robe r ts.co m
CONTINUOUS
DEVELOPMENT TEAM
PRODUCT INNOVATION
IN AN AGILE/LEAN
WORLD
@MulticastMatt
matt@matt-roberts.com
linkedin.com/in/cpgmattr

2. WHAT DO THESE IMAGES HAVE TO DO
WITH DEV-LED INNOVATION?

3.  Congratulations--you're a Product Manager who is part of a
team that finally achieved many of the benefits promised by
agile methods such as Scrum or Kanban--you have a ranking
of work items on which the team can focus, you're
eliminating waste, and you're getting things done (just
about) on time!
 There may be an effort to put nearly everyone in your
product development team (especially anyone in
development) in the system and really crank up the velocity.
However, you've noticed that the flow of new ideas coming
out of development is not quite what it once was. You say to
yourself, "at least it's better than before when they made
ALL the decisions. But my competitors are catching up..."
 Come to this session to learn about a bold potential solution
that will allow for a balance of predictable performance and
the generation of innovative ideas from your development
team.
THE ―THERE‖ THERE

4.  For the purpose of this presentation
 Innovation is the creation of new value for a particular
group of stakeholders.
 It’s worth something (like money) that stakeholders are
willing to depart with to obtain.
 For a product development company, it’s a source of
growth (as opposed to maintenance/sustaining). Growth
represents value in these organizations, especially
startups or similar smaller groups.
 It carries risk and is hard to ―manage‖
 It tends to be fun and creates engagement for the people
who create it.
WHY DO WE CARE ABOUT INNOVATION?

5.  ―Quite a few clients report that agile is anti-
innovation. The developers have a vested interest in
developing whatever they can produce within the
allowable time. They are rewarded for maintaining
the velocity of the project, not for their innovative
solutions. Note that innovation, as we use the term
here, means fresh thinking. We do not mean that
innovation is the same as invention — it’s not.
Innovation is thinking differently about the business
problem with the intention of finding more
beneficial things for the business to do.‖
 ―Keeping the Innovation in Agile‖ - Cutter Blog
http://blog.cutter.com/2012/04/10/putting-the-innovation-in-agile/
BUT WE’RE MAINTAINING VELOCITY!

6. A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY
TO AGILE…
Principles and Practices Delivery Innovation Risk
Organization Flattening Good ?
Focus on Quality Good No change
Focus on Modern Engineering Principals Good No change
Continuous Improvement / Kaizen Good Good
Focus on the Highest Ranked Priority by the
Stakeholders
Good (Finally) Eh….
Small, Collaborative Teams Good Well
Predictability Good Hmmm
Short Increments / Iterations/ Limited WIP Good Unsure
Reduction of Waste Good Define ―Waste‖
Focus on Velocity Good Yikes
―Interchangable‖ (T-shaped) Team Members Good Really?

7. CAN DEVELOPERS GENERATE VALUABLE
PRODUCT IDEAS?

8.  Google’s 20% Time (or is it 120%?  )
 Atlassian ShipIt Days
 BazaarVoice Science Fair
 CA Technologies Innovation Time Out / Hyperformix Science
Faire
 ..and so many more, based on the
concept of SLACK
SOME INDUSTRY ―SOLUTIONS‖ FOR DEV-
LED INNOVATION
Slack
Tom DeMarco

9. CA TECHNOLOGIES INNOVATION TIME OUT
What is an Innovation Time Out and its goal?
An Innovation Time Out, also known as an ITO, is a technique to foster the pursuit of new
and innovative processes or products. To accomplish this goal, each team member has
formal approval that permits them to spend up to 10% of their business time to work on
their own, qualified, innovative ideas.
What qualifies as an ITO project? To qualify as an approved ITO project, the following
parameters must be met:
One or more team members may work on any idea that supports any current product(s)
or market(s) that CA Technologies is currently in or pursuing. The idea does not have to
be limited to the product line that the team member currently works in.
The ITO project must result in proof of concept (POC) demonstration in which working
code is exhibited in an open forum hosted by an EMD senior manager.
Code: Is defined as any demonstrable function that creates a result based on a set
of inputs.
Time frame for demonstrations – Quarterly (or so)

10. CHALLENGES WITH OFFICIAL ITO
 Everyone loves the idea of the ITO, but its implementation
has been a challenge.
 Everyone is ―too busy‖ and certain people don’t like the
formality.
 Idea—put the 10% time/innovation concept into our agile
delivery system and see if all stakeholders find benefit it in.
 This is the genesis of the Hyperformix Science Faire
 Our experience is that over 20% of the ideas presented are
placed into the backlog within the same release and
prioritized to become fully productized features. This is
huge.

11. HYPERFORMIX – CONTEXT

12. HYPERFORMIX SCIENCE FAIRE
 Continuous – it’s now embedded in the product development process
 Plugged into Innovation (Patent) Harvesting
 Team’s reaction to Matt’s insistence on coding examples
 Fix a defect
 Implement small feature
 New tool
 Show prototype
 How to apply to new domain
 New technology
 New algorithm
 New/improved UI
 New/improved utility
 Developers and Product Managers LOVED it. Non-developers, not so
much—still a bit concerned. Everyone voted to do it again.
 Ideas went right into the backlog and were invested in and shipped
within weeks!
 Challenges—are we just doing prototypes for Product Management?
Is this an issue?
Time frame for demonstrations – Monthly (two days every other sprint)

13. HYPERFORMIX SCIENCE FAIRE - HOWTO
 We sprint for two weeks. So, every two sprints, we spend two days on
Science Faire. This is roughly 10% time.
 There are no rules about who works on what or how people work. People
are free to work together, on teams, or in a combination of modes (some
do both).
 Some entries are one-time only, some go on for months. The longest was
over a year.
 There are no winners or losers and there is no competitive aspect to it.
The Faire is an opportunity to share working software/learning.
 Everyone gets 10 – 15 minutes to present. The demonstrations are
recorded so that they can be shared with others. This is very important
in a large company like CA Technologies.
 We like having others, not in development, participate—we’ve had Sales
Enablement, Product Management, and Dev Management participate.
However, each team decides how they work and what they work on.
 This effort fits into our sustainable pace. We believe that we can have
these events just like any other work day and not require a traditional
hackathon environment.
 All entries (where it make sense) are placed into the product backlog for
consideration to fully productize.
 We like to create a celebratory environment—adult beverages and child-
like treats are often served.

14. PURE CLOUD
CAPACITY PLANNING
AS A SERVICE
April 16, 2013
Engineer 1, Engineer 2, Matt Roberts,
Engineer 3
HOWDY!
CA Capacity Management (Hyperformix) Dev Team

15. PCCPAAS - INTRODUCTION
 Objective of Innovation: Get SaaSy by providing a service that
can provide Capacity Planning in the cloud, for the cloud.
 Details
 Problem definition: [REDACTED ]
 Development Area: Cloud, Software as a Service, Automation
 Relevance to business: [REDACTED ]
 Solution definition: To be demonstrated

16. PCCPAAS – INTRODUCTION (CONT’D)
 Tools
 [REDACTED ]
 How this is going to kill our competition…
 [REDACTED ]
 Demonstration
 [REDACTED ]

17. WHAT HAVE YOU SEEN?

18. WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED?