Re-igniting the grill

If you've been reading this blog for a while, I'm amazed at your patience waiting for the next post that has anything to do with agile software product management.  It would be silly to say I've been busy - everyone on the planet is busy (although we are running nine different software betas right now...).  The real truth is that I've been holding off to write about something in particular.

Today we launched our beta of our new online reader!  The technology is super cool (both the parts you can easily see and some secret sauce under the hood).  But the part that excites me the most is the team ownership. 

Some agile development proponents are adamant about specific rules (XP's 40-hour work week) or specific terms (it's a "scrum" not a "status meeting"), but I think ownership is the most important part of any good software development.  So the agile product management trick is - who owns what?

When I met with the online team a little while ago, we talked about overall goals for our consumer business and then we decided as a team how we were best going to achieve those goals.  One of those goals was to make the reader much, much faster. 

As we've worked on the reader over the past weeks, the online team has had ownership of how we would make the reader faster and when they would complete each part of the work.  I have had ownership of the business decisions about what we would specifically deliver.  There has been a ton of great collaboration, and the lines between those areas blur.  But when push comes to shove, everyone knows what they own - and the team has delivered.

So what's the right division of ownership?  I think it varies greatly.  We have products where my only role is to help clear roadblocks and facilitate communication for the real owners and other products where I take a much more detailed role.  At the end of the day, I hope everyone feels like they own something really important, because they do.  NewsGator could never deliver all the truly amazing things that it does with this relatively small staff if everyone did not feel ownership and deliver against it.

So please take a look at the new reader beta.  You'll need a NewsGator online account, but you can get one for free!  Then just point your browser at:

http://www.newsgator.com/ngs/subscriber/beta.aspx

You'll be asked to sign in if you aren't already, and then just click the "Try the beta reader now!" button.

We still have some cool features to add that will make your reading experience faster, easier, and better.  You can check out the release notes on the main page and the tips to see some of the current high points.  Personally, I'm having a lot of fun watching YouTube videos inline.

As always, we value your feedback, so please let us know any issues, things that you love, or things that you would prefer to work differently on our forum:

http://www.newsgator.com/FORUM/Forum52-1.aspx

Thanks again to our online team for taking ownership of this!

P.S.  Stay close to the grill - I have some more good stuff cookin

Comments

[Derek Morrison]

Ownership is a good question to ask...Scrum identifies two key roles: Scrum

Master and Product Owners. It seems that the person responsible

for the "profit and loss" should be the Product Owner and the person

responsible for delivering technical solutions should be the scrum master

or Product Managers. for more on this topic visit my latest blog posting :

agile people working in a non-agile world