Thanksgiving Grillin!

Wow I've really let the grill go cold!  Sorry for the long absence.  The good news is that I have some help to deal with all the cool stuff we've got going on.  So I should be servin' up some more agile product management cookin' on a more regular basis.

I am extremely thankful for all the hard work and success we've had at NewsGator in the last few months, and I've tried to list some of the specific reasons below.  But the thing that got my back into my grilling apron was a meeting I had with our online team a couple days ago.

Agile product development is all about focusing on real value and delivering it as quickly and measurably as possible.  Many times this means we focus on story cards and use cases and velocity.  But on Monday, the dev, qa, and support folks took things to a completely new level.  They wanted to talk about the business.  They wanted to understand the key metrics that determine financial success, and they wanted to measure their progress against those metrics!

I've been in some large organizations where some form of metric focus was pushed down on employees by management.  But it was truly heartening to see this team take ownership and drive their efforts at a higher level!

As I mentioned above, I have many things to be thankful for here at NewsGator.  So to round off this much-delayed re-firing of the grill, I wanted to acknowledge a few efforts.

• The NewsGator Enterprise Team won InfoWorld's RSS Server Shootout
• FeedDemon version 2.1 was released
• We launched the start of beta for NewsGator Enterprise On-Demand (a hosted Enterprise RSS solution)
• We have started the beta for NewsGator Go! for J2ME (a cool mobile reader for Blackberry, Motorola, Nokia, Treo, etc - I wasn't really supposed to announce this yet since the Support folks wanted to wait until Monday...)
• Our partnership with Intel, SixApart, SocialText, Simple Feed, and SpikeSource to deliver the extremely cool SuiteTwo solution was announced.
• And a lot more that I'll need to talk about in another post!

Thanks to everyone who made all this possible.  I'm looking forward to a fantastic holiday season with many more cool announcements on the results of our agile product delivery.