Unleash the entrepreneurs in your team

Marketplaces are extremely powerful at co-ordinating scarce resources. It’s possible to use it to co-ordinate software development teams. Lets see how.

There needs to be competition between buyers and sellers. Development teams sell their services, and business units buy their services.

Buyers

You need multiple buyers. For example: the Content team, the Commercial team, and the Search team.

Each month the Big Boss can give each team credits. It can be a different amount of credits for each team, depending on the priorities of the overall business. (Or depending on results of product experiments).

For example, in month 1 the big boss might give: Content team 10 credits, Commercial team 20 credits, Search team 15 credits.

Sellers

You also need multiple sellers, that is development teams. I think it’s best if the teams don’t specialise and that you rotate one person per team per iteration.

The process

At the start of each iteration the buyers (business units) try and persuade dev teams (sellers) to do their work in return for credits. The credits are effectively a measure of how valuable the work is.

Typically, the dev team with the lower “price” will win the work. The dev teams compete for credits – it’s a measure of how much value the team adds to the business.

As with most metrics, it should only be taken seriously over the long-term. Otherwise, investment in quality code and automation will be half-baked.

If you rotate teams then the credits should be divided equally between the members of the team. It becomes a measure of how effective each developer is.

Promoting experiments

The distribution of credits each month should be based on the potential of each business unit to drive the business forward. This encourages an MVP/experiments approach.

Promoting collaboration

Having business units spend credits on dev work highlights the scarcity of dev resource. It should promote involvement and collaboration from the business.

Britain’s Got Talent: The ultimate in Agile

BGT embodies Agile. Think of acts as products.

• SMALL STEPS. Iterative. Every week takes the show one step closer to finding the Next Big Thing.
• EMPIRICAL FEEDBACK (aka experiments). An act’s potential is measured using audience votes.
• SELF-ORGANIZING TEAMS. Bottom-up. Some of the acts could never be conceived in a board room. (Susan Boyle, anyone?).
• FAIL FAST, FAIL OFTEN. Doomed acts are eliminated at a furious rate in the early stages of the show.
• SIMPLICITY. Acts are forced to distill their talent into a few minutes. The minimum viable product.
• CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT. Every week acts gets feedback to improve their performance.
• COLLABORATION AND CONVERSATION. There is lots of open discussion (on the show and in the media/pub) about which act is best. And it includes dissent.

In my next post, TOWIE share tips on iPhone development using Objective C. I’m joking.

Product owners: the cold hard stats

This week i had agile training. It stressed the importance of dedicated product owners. The trainer told us that the bare minimum is 50% of the product owners time.

Where i work it’s common to have a nominal product owner who can only spare 5-10% of their time. This effectively means that 80-90% of requirements are “made up” by the dev team.

Put another way, it takes 5-10 times longer for the company to get the product it wants.

It means the dev team are wasting 80-90% of their time.

The quickest fix is to start making members of the dev team into product owners to address the balance.

Re-Organise for Resilience – Highlights

Here are my highlights from the intro of Re-organise for Resilience, the latest book on my reading list.

“The second group [of companies who made it through recession]… came out of adverse markets not only mere survivors, but actually having leveraged adverse markets to catapult themselves far ahead of their competitors. These firms find ways to embrace downturns that turn adversity into opportunity: they survive and thrive at the same time.

… I found that those companies built around an inside-out mind-set – those pushing out products and services to the marketplace based on a narrow viewpoint of their customers that looks at them only through the narrow lens of their products – are less resilient in turbulent times than those organized around an outside-in mind-set that starts with the marketplace, then looks to deliver creatively on market opportunities. Outside-in orientation maximises customer value – and produces more supple organizations.”

“Level 3 firms… They focus first on the problems their customers are trying to solve, and only then turn to their products, configuring their offerings to address those problems. Further, they conserve resources by allocating them only those tasks that will help customers most…

The most resilient companies – level 4 firms – go well beyond their competitors their competitors… A level 4 firm is more attached to producing solutions to those problems than it is to the products and services it offers. This intellectual, structural and emotional transition means that it is no longer concerned whether the inputs it uses to solve customers’ problems are its own or assembled through a network of partners.”

Product Owner Essentials

From “Getting Real” (37signals).

• Underdo Your Competition
• Fix Time and Budget, Flex Scope
• Less Mass
• Lower Your Cost of Change
• Embrace Constraints
• Half, Not Half-Assed
• Start With No
• Hidden Costs
• Rinse and Repeat

The book contains loads of other useful advice too. Genius.

Guardian. News lists. Product lists.

The guardian is opening up some of it’s news lists to the public.

Maybe we should do the same with some of our product feature lists.

Testing. Usability. Awesome.

The dev team recently got showed up by the newspaper iPad team. Their usability testing was awesome.

Firstly, they actually did some usability testing.

Secondly, the subjects were from a range of teams and “ranks”.

Thirdly, the tests were with one subject and one observer at a time. As a subject, i found that this approach made it easy to have a proper conversation. It was open, engaging, enjoyable and didn’t take up much time.

It was a contrast to product meetings which i find can be riddled with groupthink, politics and, i confess, boredom. (For more on groupthink check out “Irrationality” chapters 3-7).

Maybe we can take the awesomeness to the next level. Usability testing is late in the process… what if we applied a similar approach earlier? To mockups. The ideas/concept stage. Work in progress.

On the dev team we do seek feedback. But usually only from the relevant stakeholder, not from elsewhere. Maybe we can recruit people via Chatter (especially if they say in their bio what their pet projects are).

And we should seek out opinions from the frontline such as the developers implementing the feature or the writers who will be using it day-in day-out.

I suspect we often look for validation, not a fresh perspective. Maybe getting just one or two other people’s views could make a difference.

Maybe we could stick a mockup/concept/screenshot on the kitchen/toilet wall with a space for feedback.

Feedback is good. Engaging other teams is good. It might just conjure up some innovation along the way. I intend to find out

Why products are like a works jolly to Paris

If you’ve ever been to Paris (or anywhere else) with 50 people you will know that the bigger the group the harder it is to get anything done or to get anywhere.

The length of time it takes for the group to make a decision increases drastically with the number of people in the group.

This is similar to the number of features in a product. The more features, the harder it is to get anything done (see my previous post on the subject).

Sometimes you see a professional tour group leader (you know, the ones waving an umbrella). They massively reduce the “slow-motion” effect of travelling in a group. The product equivalent is the product owner. Every big group of features needs one!

the incredible hoque

hoque, i love the user generated article idea. you dont need to wait for a big meeting about it. start small. write one short article for metro.

if a channel doesnt exist for it speak to content team about creating one. (maybe a community channel?). miguel and artur are also into diversifying our content.

if you need help, gareth is a closet writer. or persuade someone else to write an article. panos is into gaming. gareth is into books. larry is into film. miguel is into travel. zoe? friends?

start small and let your idea gather momentum.

maybe content team can give us a 5 minute lightning talk: a beginners guide to writing articles.

Top 5 Books For Evil Masterminds

If, like me, you are plotting world domination, here are my favorite books on the subject.

1. “Purple Cow” (Seth Godin). Remarkable products sell themselves. Seth has a great writing style. Inspirational.
2. “Adapt” (Tim Harford). How to innovate your way to a remarkable product – experiment based on variation and selection. Great stories including toasters, Iraq, Google, climate change and much more.
3. “Super Crunchers” - first two chapters. Expands on the “Randomistas” chapter of “Adapt”. AB testing for the win!
4. “80 Minute MBA” - ”Conversation” chapter. The “new marketing” is all about Community, Conversation, Co-creation and Customisation (long tail).
5. “Getting Real” (37Signals). A refreshing view of business in tasty bitesized chunks. Stay lean.

What have i missed? Let me know!

BTW. I’m applying the “Adapt” approach to books. I’m reading the first chapter of lots of varied books and casting aside the ones that aren’t awesome. It’s slightly expensive, but for the insight gained its a bargain! Thank god for the Kindle…