Agile widget grillin'

The Syndication Services group at NewsGator is really great example of the power of customer involvement and rapid iteration.  They work so quickly and in such close partnership with customers, that they don't have any product management resource assigned for the widget production.

But they do have a lot of product management experience in the people who guide the team, and that lets them make decisions quickly.  And they have very skillful account managers who make sure expectations are understood and communication happens quickly (along with very strong support staff who back everything up.)  EDIT:  Just realized that I probably didn't make it clear enough in this paragraph that it is the very experienced and talented development and QA folks who are the linchpin to getting the widgets built quickly, correctly, and beautifully.  I probably should have shortened this whole thing to say that this is an excellent team!

The end result is really cool!  Yesterday, the new travel widgets for USA Today were released!  These are sexy widgets built in Flash that allow USA Today to be the first national newspaper to make content available in detachable widgets.  I have travel news on my Facebook profile page now!

At the same time, the Associate Press wrote a great story about the trend of newspapers toward widgets.

The point of all this from an agile product management point of view is that when customer communication is great, iterations are really rapid, the team is really skilled and experienced, and the scope of the work is not huge, product management is not really necessary.  I'd love to have some claim to the credit for their great work, but the Syndication Services team churns out awesome, customer-pleaseing widgets all by themselves!

If you'd like to see some of the other cool widgets this very agile team has produced, you can just hop over to http://www.newsgatorwidgets.com/

Comments

[Don Jones]

Yes, there really is no substitute for closely listening to your customers.

Microsoft's Vista release was a classic example of them not doing this. When it was about to be introduced in its then achingly-slow form, some of their large customers took them out to the woodshed. So MS waited until the end to really involve customers. Bad mistake.