Free products = grillin' in the tornado

As you may have already seen, NewsGator announced today that all client products are free.  At the same time, we released new versions of NetNewsWire, FeedDemon, NewsGator Inbox, and NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile.  Though we didn't make any noise in the press release about it, we also released an update to our online reader and several important changes to our API's at the same time.  There's more detailed information in the FAQ.

So here's the agile product management thought on this:  OMG!

As is typical here at NewsGator, there wasn't a ton of time between when we decided to do this and when we made it happen.  In a big command and control environment, someone would have built a giant project plan.  That probably would have taken a week just by itself.

Instead, we gathered the first stakeholders with the riskiest changes and had a chat about it.  Then everyone took ownership of their own piece - the client developers, the platform team, the platform team, the online reader team, marketing, support, etc.  We looked for the critical items that one group would need to complete for another group and those were the only things that we put on the calendar (such as it was).  The group of all stakeholders only met about three times.

This just can't happen without tons of maturity and ownership by the people involved.  But that's what makes Agile, and NewsGator, really work.