This document discusses collaborative product development in the cannabis industry. It notes that the industry currently lacks competition due to heavy regulation and stigma. It advocates adopting agile development practices used successfully in technology, which emphasize frequent testing and releases based on user feedback. The document stresses the importance of research to avoid mistakes others have made. It also emphasizes that product development should be a fun, collaborative process to keep teams motivated and proud of their work in this new industry.

1. CannaVator Product Presentation
Collaborative Product Building

2. A little about me
I have founded several companies and have been an early
team member in others
Generally president or CEO, and therefore ultimately
responsible for product and product strategy
Responsible for directly managing product on many
projects
Active early stage investor, mentor and board adviser

3. Collaborative Product Development
• If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect
wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather
teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
• Design by committee does not work…

4. Nascent Industry
• Lots of opportunity, compared to other industries
• Heavy regulation and social stigma means less competition
• Where there is less competition there is less pressure on product
developers to be great and produce great products
• Loosening of regulation will make this industry much more
competitive, requiring better product process, management, and
teams
• More emphasis on product focus, process and team cohesion
• For the last 20 years, technology companies have moved
progressively to flatter organizations. How have they been able to do
so?

5. Tools
For the technology industry, open source code, which is both a product
and a tool, lead to a massive creation of other tools, a change in our
expectations as to the types of tools available, and how much we pay
for them…
Explosion in the market for extremely affordable tools, including tools
for product development
• Product collaboration software
• API and feeds
• Monitoring tools
• Even co-working facilities and accelerators
Our entire perception of the product development has changed
• First question – what don’t I have to build?
• Hacking things together
• What can I get for free

6. Industry climbing out of the muck
Compare to Web 1.0
• Land grab by companies, generally porting traditional industries
to the web or creating basic internet scaffolding….
• Yahoo, eBay, Amazon … platforms that users visited to get
products or information
• Similar stage to the cannabis industry today, moving from
illegal to a regulated, and increasingly open environment
Web 2.0 was a web evolution characterized by user-to-user
interaction and systems interoperability. The focus of web 2.0
companies was to create platforms that enabled users to create
the valuable information available through their platforms.
• Massive effect on product development – now product
management became all about listening to users, building fast,
releasing code often, even with bugs, failing fast, obsessively
tracking behavior, testing, building in increments, in short…

7. Agile Development
• Dominates product development in technology, particularly smaller
companies - basically incremental product design approach and process,
in opposition to tradition heavy scoping of product planning…
• Projects are broken out by stages. Each stage is broken into sub stages,
and each sub stage is broken into individually executable steps
• Let’s not invent anything here…
• Core tactics include
• Test driven design (if issues arise, there is a test to locate the problem)
• Work in teams so that everyone is familiar with the entire project
• Daily check-ins
• Product releases are frequent – product is built like a pyramid, working code atop of
working code
• Smaller steps are easier to take than giant leaps, put alternatively, giant leaps are
achieved through series of smaller steps
Many additional developments and iterations of this philosophy that are
beyond the scope of our discussion, which some do not want to hear…

8. Agile Development Philosophy…
Underlying themes are extremely collaborative
• Team members work better when they work together,
even at the cost of development speed
• Pair programming
• Teams that are self-organized are better motivated
• Quality product is achieved by motivated teams
• Predicting the future is an unscrupulous activity – better to
create feedback loops with end users and customers, and
build an organization capable of iterating quickly
• Effective development is better than quick development
• Or, just build a quality products, which is…..

9. So, this brings up the most often
neglected aspect of product development
(Alternative title: “How a product team makes its first bad decision”)

10. Research

11. They stumble that run fast…
• Agile development accustoms participants to rapid
deployment cycles and quick releases
• Roll back code
• Research, research, research
• So frequently others have failed, but as product strategists we think
we can do it better. How? A few more features?
• Learn from others’ mistakes
• Get smart on research (good reason to attend this conference)
• A method to nurture curiosity . . . and attitude

12. So much fun
There is another aspect of collaborative development that
is almost always omitted – Fun
• Building product can be so much fun
• Building great products is even more fun
• Build great, successful product is too much fun to bear
• Fulfilling for employees even if company is less profitable
• pride in a good product goes a long way and will keep your team
together even in lean times, when profit trails
• particularly important to smaller companies, when massive
challenges are frequent
• valuable as companies grows, as roles change and managerial
overhead becomes more necessary

13. Green Fields
• Collaboration in product development is a known process,
and one valued by investors who may be concerned with
execution risk in this industry…
• People already gravitate to your industry because it is
lucrative. What else? it is something they can believe in –
medicine, society, politics.
• What better motivation can there be in an industry
perceived to lack that very thing?

14. romanarz@gmail.com
Questions/Comments