WatTF? – Jim Murphy

Andre Kaminski quotes Barbara Nelson’s The Politics of Agile, “When product managers weren’t looking, the developers went agile.”  in a new post up at Pragmatic Marketing called “The Mythical Product Owner“.  Its great to see these two worlds combine.  The sum of the parts is a much greater help to companies wrestling with not only how to build products but what to build and for who.

Fitting tactical level thinking (where agile excels) into a compatible strategic framework is a powerful combination.  I’m not sure of the distinction between the Product Manager Role and the traditional Product Owner as drawn.  It appears that the Product Manager is defined to be more strategic and have more market orientation.  I’m not sure I buy the separation in my world where companies are small and people are stretched thin but I can see it in larger orgs.  I wonder abotu it because the Prouct Owner stops being the “owner” of anything and really just a middle manager of sorts with dubious authority.  In my experience the way for developers to have confidence in a backlog is to have them build it or have market data.  Not sure I’d want that Product Owner job.

I’ve spent a lot of time making agile development work in startups and it ain’t easy.  Necessary but not easy.  Agile has always felt natural to me – from a cultural point of view that when I read about Kent Beck and XP it was exciting to see some substance forming around this approach in contrast to more prevalent and much heavier methodologies.

I liked XP as an engineer but from the business side of things found that it was limited to encouraging good engineering practices but not much else.  That’s when I learned about SCRUM – the agile methodology that adds the project management rituals that are compatible with the engineering practices of XP.  Great, I figured,  now I can really build cool products! Er…maybe.

Scrum is the way we run the AideRSS engineering group its what I’ve used at Mindreef and previously as well.  But, over the years I’ve realized that the toughest problem – the one that matters most and was consistently the most challenging – was figuring out what the product backlog should be.

The backlog is the answer to the question: “What is the most important work we should do right now?” it presumes that you could confidently make that list, and keep it up to date as things change – or at least articulate what you’re building and for whom.  Embedded in that assumption is why startups fail.  How do you really make the best backlog for your company?

XP and Scrum don’t have much to say – they punt.  Its by far the hardest part of the puzzle of shipping successful products and both recommend that you get a customer in the room and ask them to clarify what they want as you go.  Well, that’s fine as far as it goes but when you’re a startup and you don’t have customers yet you need a way to bootstrap and that can feel awfully chaotic and wasteful. What’s worse is that as you grow you’ve probably developed some pretty bad habits as far as setting priorities and strategy: like thinking you’re a genius – just because you got funded – and that genius is what allows you to *know* what the market wants.

Product Management is the generally accepted answer to the question above and though I love the folks at Pragmatic Marketing for their excellent offerings in this area, product management isn’t all that well connected to agile development, especially in a startup.

I recently listened to the VentureHacks podcast of Steve Blank’s talks at Stanford on the topic of “Customer Development”.  A blog post: “How to develop your customers the way you develop your product” links to resources that describe the idea.  Wrapping the iterative nature of agile development in another outer loop called Customer Development makes a ton of sense to me.  Its the first time I’ve seen an approach to the Market/Product fit problem that makes sense the same way agile makes sense to software developers.  I’m looking forward to digging into this some more and applying it to how we evolve at AideRSS.

Oh, some guy called Marc Andreessen things Steve’s book is nifty too.

I’m really surprised by the blasé attitude of people I speak with and reporting in the Canadian media about the global financial crisis.  It seems many feel that this happens from time to time and doesn’t really affect them.

Banks

Autos

I’ve been reviewing the recent Prosperity Institute Report: Ontario in the Creative Age on initiating the conversation about moving the culture of commerce in Ontario from manufacturing centered to creative and innovation centered.  Its a pretty inspiring thought for a software guy who left Ontario for US innovation centers for over a decade.

Here are a few points that stood out for me:

• “Our economy is shifting away from jobs based largely on physical skills or repetitive tasks to ones that require analytical skills and judgment.”

• “…there is considerable pressure on governments to protect the past and to undertake bailouts – to preserve what we have during this time of uncertainty. But this protective approach can only forestall the inevitable. There is a better way”

• “This must be more than a government effort. … Businesses should make these choices for their own benefit, not in response to government directives.”

• “The evidence shows we rank well behind a set of peer regions in North America and  behind the best global peers in economic output per person – perhaps the single best measure of our overall economic prosperity. And in recent decades, we have seen our advantage erode from near parity with these global leaders”

• “Ontario is relatively prosperous; but our assessment is that we have settled for a level of prosperity that sells our province short. While it is not comforting to admit, we have in fact lost ground against the very best economies over the past twenty years…our citizens’ creative skills are less developed than those of the world’s leading jurisdictions”

Lots of this report is motherhood and apple pie, and sounds very unsurprising coming from Richard Florida who’s creative class evangelism is not new – Revenge of the Squelchers.  The sections “Raise the Creativity Content of Occupations” and “Capturing Ontario’s Diversity Advantage” highlight some critical insights: Ontario needs to more closely align its values with creative values.  There are no programs, incentives, tax reform or anything else that will overcome overly conservative and stodgy social attitudes.

“A place like Pittsburgh or Rochester can have substantial  technology, but will fail to grow if talent leaves, and it lacks the openness and tolerance to attract new people.”

Ontario needs to be a magnet for attracting talent not a place young talented creatives see in their rear view mirror on their way to more attractive places.  Address the brain drain problem!

AideRSS is proud to host Michael Nielsen’s upcoming series of technology lectures aimed at understanding the how’s and why’s of Google’s technology infrastructure.  This is the massivly scaled platform that lets new applications reach global users, and lets googlers iterate and innovate without re-inventing too many new wheels.

Read about it on Michaels blog.

I’ve always been confused by the auto industry and the Ontario governments bazaar relationship to it.  The big 3 sure seem big and in my experience things that big tend to be pretty stupid.  That may sound harsh but its certainly been playing itself out lately.

When I was in Engineering school in Ontario during the early 90’s there was plenty of talk about the declining status of the big three – as a 2nd year co-op student I clearly remember thinking that I wasn’t interested in going down on that sinking ship.  Over the years I was confused again watching the big 3 churn out crap year after year with impunity.  Over nearly 2 decades, whenever I’d get unlucky enough to land myself in a new rental car made buy the big 3 I was confused some more: who would willingly produce this crap?  And who’s buying it?  Why?

This is nothing new.  Its been going on for decades, literally.  Over the years our provincial and regional governments have leveraged the economic stability of our industrial sector by making deals with the big 3 to produce more and more of this crap in Ontario.  Every plant is seen as some sort of economic win when its really as healthy as a crack house. Its been short term, uninformed thinking that has now created the perfect storm catastrophe we will inevitably witness over the coming decade.  Now that the big 3 have gotten themselves in such a mess we’re confronted with this question of a bailout as if its a new problem that’s just been created.  That some how the big3 are somehow victim of greedy wall street banks.  I can believe that the credit crisis makes it more difficult to operate – but its difficult because the credit is so necessary and its so necessary because the balance sheet is such a mess and the balance sheet is a mess because they don’t sell enough product!

A bail out will fix this?  A bail out program filled with loan guarantees and labor strings attached will do nothing more than delay the inevitable and force this market into an even more unnatural place with yet more on its shoulders if it ever would recover.  When its well known that car manufactures can make better products for less i ts inevitable and propping up this artifice doesn’t do anyone any good. ($38/hr vs. $70/hr for big 3)  Even the Governator gets it.

Talking with a cross section of people on the subject the only reason I hear for supporting a bailout is to prevent the impact to the rest of the economy – its a hostage situation – not something to keep or fix. The fact that our Ontario government has the economy so tuned around a model that’s been broken and in decline for decades is plain irresponsible and bad governance.

It seems plausible to me that significant elements of the big 3 (or all of them) will be gone in the next several years, but automobile manufacturing will still be an economic mainstay.  I’m not sure why we feel the corporations of Ford, GM and Chrysler can’t fail – it happens all the time in my industry and its taken as a healthy sign.  Out with the old and in with the new.  It doesn’t mean the industry/work goes away it just means things change, and that can’t be all bad – especially for these guys.

This is conference week for me first Defrag in Denver then later in the week ApacheCon in New Orleans.  Tuesday I traveled from Denver to New Orleans and spent a good part of the night checking out live music on Bourbon street while periodically checking in for election results.  By 11pm it was pretty clear who the winner was going to be and the street was electric with celebration.

I couldn’t help but notice that not everyone was celebrating.  It was a real life excercise in demographics.  Young black musicians were jamming on the street in an infectious, raucous improv band, middle aged women visiting from blue states were waving and dancing, white dudes in football jerseys and oversized beers were not so jolly looking.  After the obvious there were more nuanced layers of reaction.

Regardless – it was a great place to be on an historic night.I found myself on an unexpected rollercoaster of emotion from celbrating to welling up with tear.

I’ve heard lots of complaining about blog claiming at technorati – so I figured I’d try it myself.
Technorati Profile

Just got back from RubyFringe in Toronto and have some serious sleep to catch up on.  Pete Forde and crew at UnSpace did a fantastic job of organizing this, part tech, part culture, part revival, part cocktail party event.  The photostream speaks for itself.

There were several great talks.  My favorite was Damien Katz’s very personal story of cashing in his chips as a programmer @ IBM in Boston, selling the house, moving the family back home to Charlotte, NC to be nearer to family…all with any prospect of a job waiting for him.  I can seriously relate to that leap and it was inspiring to hear him relate the highs and lows that a change like that entails.  Damien says he knew peole worked on really cool projects and asked himself why he couldn’t be one of those people.  He took the leap and made it happen – with a wife and lovely baby girl besid ehim.  Apache CouchDB definitely counts as a cool project.  I love that Damien admitted to not knowing how to build CouchDB when he started.  But, he stuck it out and did it.  Props.

There were plenty of other highlights; I’m sure the live recordings of Zed Shaw will get noticed by the Ruby/Rails community.  I thought that was fun to watch but strangely self indulgent.  Maybe having 3 young kids at home has developed my appreciation for childish behavior – I enjoy watching them do silly stuff too.

I just have to say I’m *really* enjoying the drama unfolding between Apple and the Canadian roll out of the iPhone with Rogers.  It shines a bright light on what has been a tremendous market imbalance since the get-go.  What I find interesting is that when compared against existing Blackberry plans the Rogers iPhone lineup is actually cheaper – which makes for some interesting discussions since the iPhone set are up in arms with petitions and every other kind of digital pitchfork jabbing they can imagine.   Its no wonder why the Blackberry users of Canada have been so complacent – their bills mostly go to the company.  Assuming the bad PR and potential market sanctions have the desires effect maybe even Rogers will hear it.  And that could mean a long awaited chink in the armor.