Grillin' in the Storm

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

Grillin' up a Holiday Gift!

I've got a blog post upcoming where I'll get back on the topic of agile product management, but I just wanted to mention that NewsGator has launched a holiday promotion - get $10 off the purchase of any of our products NetNewsWire, FeedDemon, Inbox, Go! for Windows Mobile, and more.

 

You can see all the great products here.  To take advantage of this, you just type "NGHoliday" in the shopping cart promo field.  When you press Update or Checkout, you'll see your savings!

Happy Holidays,

Brian

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.

Overcooked and how many courses in a meal?

Two vacations in the same month definitely means I've left a few items on the grill for too long - this blog being one of them.  Sorry about letting it go for a while.

On the plus side, I have a "secrect sauce" idea to share today.  Agile software development suggests frequent releases, but enterprises generally don't like to update software frequently.  So the question of the day is how many releases per year makes sense for an enterprise product?

For very mature enterprise products that are installed on premise, I would suggest that probably once per year is about as often as customers will tolerate.  This depends a lot on the upgrade pain, but that generally seems like a good rule of thumb (plus or minus 3 months).

But startup companies are almost always delivering younger products, so there is a period early in the life of a product that provides the greatest opportunity to evolve it quickly and use agile practices.  As enterprises are in the evaluation and rollout phases, new functionality can be added quite rapidly. 

For our NewsGator Enterprise Server, for example, we have delivered four releases this year.  Now the product is quite mature for its one-year-old age, but we have been able to be extremely responsive to customers and deliver a lot of great functionality (as well as globalize it for delivery via our partners in Japan) by focusing on short cycles.

As the product matures and the installed based continues to grow, the test load increases and, for efficiency purposes, it makes sense to do longer development cycles to balance against the increased testing duration.  At the same time, enterprise customers have rolled out and tend to start prefering less frequent updates.

So the "secret sauce" is to iterate quickly on young products.  Hopefully that makes up a little for leaving the grill unattended for a while.  Talk to you again soon.

Umbrella drinks

Sometimes in a startup company you have to slow down to speed up - take a little time to focus on what is really important, plan, prioritize, etc.

This is not one of those time!  Right now, I need to speed up, so I can slow down.  Apologies for the lack of posts recently, but tomorrow I'm taking a few days of vacation.  I'll put together some good blog thoughts on the plane, but for now I'll just leave you with a visual.

Sometimes agile does mean fast cookin'

First of all, we released betas of new Firefox and IE toolbars today!  Beyond auto-detecting feeds and making it really easy to add them, Nick Harris has included some very cool functionality based on our platform.  These versions require the .Net 2.0 platform, but it's well worth installing to try them out.

Second, I thought it would be worth adding some color around Brad's post on the NewsGator blogroll feature.  From my point of view, the story looked like this:

8:58pm - Sitting at my desk responding to the last emails of the day when a new email from Brad shows up.  Hmmm...he's saying we have a cool feature that's hard to find.  I write back an excuse about all the other cool things we're doing and tell him that I am actually planning to write a TypePad Widget to make this easier.

9:16pm - Brad writes back that he's going to blog about this in the next 24 hours...

9:17pm - I go read the developer guidelines for writing a TypePad Widget.  Hey, this really does look as simple as the nice folks from SixApart said...

10:27pm - I proudly send back my Widget code to Brad and go back to getting my real work done

7:42am - I realize I should probably test my Widget (now it probably starts to become obvious why I do Product Management and not things like development or quality assurance...)  Hmmm...there's some problem.  I give our online team a head's up that I've got something brewing and head into meetings

2:38pm - I get some help and realize that I have an invalid API key...hmmm...maybe I should have read the instructions more carefully.  A quick edit and TA DA - working widget!  The folks at SixApart really deserve credit for a super-simple API and, of course, all of the cool Blogroll functionality was actually provided in a single line of code from NewsGator!

So now you can see two Blogrolls over in the right column.  The one with the bold black title is coming from my NewsGator online account - very cool!  And we'll have this available for other TypePad users soon.

Not much of this has to do with Product Management.  And this is another example of unplanned items leading to increases in cumulative flow for our online team (they still need to integrate the Widget code into our site and test it).  But it does represent the spirit of agile in terms of listening to the customer and building something quickly that delivers value. 

We're committed to continuously improving our products through customer feedback.  So back to my first point, try out Nick's cool new toolbars and let us know what you think.

One chef at the grill but hundreds of idea cookers

One of the cool things about startup companies is that everyone can (and should) feel ownership of the products.  It's necessary to have product management to make the final decisions efficiently, but everyone can provide input.

One of the ways I try to encourage this is through internal contests.  Every couple of weeks, I ask people to send me emails with answers to different questions.  The contests have quite a bit of variety.  Sometimes I'll ask people to use specific features in one of the products.  Sometimes I'll ask for stories about how they use something or how they would like it to work.

Right now, I'm running a contest where I'm asking everyone in the company for a completely new use for RSS.  It's amazing!  The ideas are extremely creative, and some of them will make great additions to NewsGator products (or maybe totally new products...hmmm)

The reward for winning a contest is some public recognition and usually a gift certificate (though one winner asked for a cowbell...seriously, and I bought it for him).  It's fun and it really helps drive real-world feedback into the products - which is what I think agile is all about.

So how do you leverage your "idea cookers"?