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

It's the little things

Hmmm...crazy schedules are keeping me from posting as often as I'd like.  Last week, I really wanted to talk about all the cool stuff NewsGator released:  NewsGator Go! mobile reader, NewsGator Desktop Sync, and the new comments feature in our online reader (you can make a free account to try them out).

But the little thing that I've been meaning to talk about is a little TypePad Widget that I prototyped (and then the NewsGator devs fixed!) after a little prompting from Brad Feld.

If you'd like to add your Blogroll to your TypePad blog, it's now just a click of a button (after a little navigating in the NewsGator online reader).  Sign in to the reader and click My Settings in the top navigation, then click Edit Locations, and click the Blogroll link in the top section.

You should see an image like the one below.  After you click the checkbox, you can add your blogroll to your TypePad blog with a click of the button.

Yup - it's a little thing - especially compared to all the other cool stuff we did last week.  But agile development is a lot about doing a bunch of little things really well and really quickly.

Have fun,
Brian

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.