I participated in Marty Cagan's Silicon Valley Product Group Workshop on How To Create Products Customers Love in San Francisco Oct 27-28, 2015. The following year I participated in Jeff Patton and Jeff Gothelf's Smart Scrum Product Ownership workshop in New York City September 15-16, 2016. Our R&D department at Procore Technologies, Inc. asked me to share lessons from these workshops in a 20 minute lunch and learn format. It was a fun exercise to go through the workbooks and notes to pick out what I thought were valuable themes to share with others. I shared the presentation slide deck with Marty, Jeff, and Jeff and they encouraged me to post on SlideShare. This presentation summarizes what I thought were some of the compelling and useful messages from the workshops.

1. Team- Based
Product Ownership
Jeff Patton Jeff Gothelf

2. Themes
Develop Shared Understanding
Map the User Story
Keep It Lean

3. Shared Understanding

4. Shared Understanding

5. Shared Understanding

6. Shared Understanding

7. Shared Understanding

8. Shared Understanding
1. Exactly what problem will this solve? (value proposition)
2. For whom do we solve that problem? (target market)
3. How will we measure success? (business metrics)
4. How big is the opportunity? (market size)
5. What alternatives are out there? (competitive landscape)
6. Why are we best suited to pursue this? (our differentiator)
7. Why now? (market window)
8. How will we launch this product? (go to market strategy)
9. What factors are critical to success? (solution requirements/risks)
10.Given the above, what’s the recommendation? (go or no-go)

9. Opportunity Canvas
Users & Customers
What types of users and customers have the
challenges your solution addresses?
Look for differences in user’s goals or uses that
would affect their use of the product. Separate
users and customers into different types based
on those differences that make a difference. It’s
a bad idea to target “everyone” with your
product.
Problems
What problems do prospective users and
customers have today that your solution
addresses?
Solution ideas
List product, feature, or enhancement ideas that
solve problems for your target audience.
User Value
If your target audience has your solution, how
can they do things differently as a
consequence? And, how will that benefit them?
User Metrics
What user behaviors can you measure that will
indicate they adopt, use, and place value in your
solution?
Solutions Today
How do users address their problems today?
List competitive products or work-around
approaches your users have for meeting their
needs.
Adoption Strategy
How will customers and users discover and
adopt your solution?
Business Problems
What problem for your business does building this product, feature, or enhancement
solve for your business?
Business Metrics
What business performance metrics will be affected by the success of this solution?
These usually change as a consequence of behavior metrics changing.
Title:
Date:
Iteration:
1
2
1
3
4
6
5
7
8
9
Budget
What’s it worth to you?
How much money and/or development would
you budget to discover, build, and refine this
solution?
Download at: http://jpattonassociates.com/opportunity-canvas/
10

10. Shared Understanding
Valuable
UsableFeasible

11. Shared Understanding
Talk to stakeholders
Collocate
Iterate
Be flexible
Make assumptions
Impose an idea
Group think
Let HiPPO’s steer
DO DON’T

12. Map the User Story
Who are we building for?
What are their goals?
Why are we building the product?
How will users benefit?

13. Map the User Story

15. (1) Frame
- What?
- Who?
- Why?
(2) Map the Big Picture
- Get the whole story
- Start with user most critical to success
- Identify user activities
- Add additional users

16. (3) Explore
- Fill the body of your story map
- Think “blue sky”
- Play “Wouldn’t it be cool if…”
- Look for variations
- Look for exceptions
- Consider other users
- Add in other product details
- Involve others

17. (4) Slice Out Viable Releases
- Slice your map into holistic product releases
- Name the large outcomes and impacts
- Identify product success metrics

18. (5) Slice Out a Development Strategy
- Slice release into delivery phases
- Opening Game: build a “functional walking skeleton”
- Mid Game: complete major functionality
- End Game: refine the product
- Plan the work necessary to refine stories
- Workshop stories to agree on acceptance criteria
- Plan development and testing
- Build and verify parts of working software

19. Map the User Story
“It’s a matter of perspective. From up
high, user needs look very similar. From
street level, user needs appear very
different.”

20. Map the User Story
“Generally, it is a bad design strategy to
try to please everyone.”

21. Map the User Story
“Eliminating people with specific needs
makes the product better.”

22. Map the User Story
Splash Zone

23. Keep It Lean
Rapid Iteration

24. Keep It Lean
Flexibility &
Time to Value

25. Keep It Lean
“The job of the product team is to identify
the minimal possible product that meets the
objectives and provides the desired user
experience – minimizing time to market,
user and implementation complexity”

26. Keep It Lean
Output Minimizer
Design
Implementation
Opportunities
Discovery
Roadmap

27. Keep It Lean
“Stakeholder ideas are wrong
most of the time.”

28. Keep It Lean
“The essence of strategy is choosing
what not to do.”

29. Keep It Lean
“You have to pick carefully.
I'm actually as proud of the things we
haven't done as the things I have done.
Innovation is saying ‘no’ to 1,000 things.”

30. Keep It Lean

31. Keep It Lean
Outcome > Output

33. References
http://jpattonassociates.com/
http://www.jeffgothelf.com/
http://svpg.com/