Agile Product Management with Scrum: Creating Products that Customers Love (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Cohn))

includes creating the product vision; grooming the product

Why wait for the official product launch to see how the market responds? Release early and often, but with high quality. Learn from early customer and user feedback and incorporate it into the software. Get it out. Then get it right.

What would be the consequences of fixing time and quality and flexing functionality?

What would be the benefits to releasing early and frequently? And what would it take to do it?

What would it take to organize your projects in quarterly cycles?

What’s the velocity of your team?

Do you employ a release burndown or plan? Who creates and updates it?

Velocity is an indicator of how much work the team can do in a sprint; it allows us to track and forecast the project’s progress. More precisely, velocity is the sum of the effort for the work results accepted by the product owner in a sprint.

with all things, there is no free lunch. Frequent releases do have a price: The software must be of high quality, and the product must be easy to obtain and install

product backlog has four qualities: It is detailed appropriately, estimated, emergent, and prioritized, making it DEEP.1

following questions will help you apply the vision concepts discussed:

Do your products follow shared goals?

How are the goals derived and who creates them?

What would it take to create a vision with the qualities described in this chapter?

How would such a vision improve your innovation process?

A product road map is a planning artifact that shows how the product is likely to evolve across product versions, facilitating a dialogue between the Scrum team and the stakeholders.

Note that the Kano Model makes an interesting prediction: Over time, delighters will eventually become performance functions and performers will become basics. Eventually, products lose their competitive advantages as the competition begins to provide similar products.

The model distinguishes between three types of functions: basics, performance functions, and delighters. Let’s use a mobile phone to understand how the Kano Model works. Basic functions of a mobile phone include switching the phone on and off; making and receiving calls; and composing, sending, receiving, and reading text messages. These rudimentary functions are necessary to sell a product but quickly cause customer satisfaction to stagnate. For instance, adding another button to switch the phone on and off would not add any value. Failing to provide a basic function usually renders the product useless. Performance functions lead to a linear increase in satisfaction. They follow the principle “The more, the better.” For instance, the lighter the phone is and the more quickly it starts up, the more satisfied customers tend to be with it. Customers cannot get enough of performance requirements. They are not sufficient, though, to differentiate the product in the marketplace. Delighters, as the name suggests, delight and excite customers. An attractive product design and the ability to personalize the phone are examples of delighters. Delighters can be related to latent and hidden customer needs—needs customers were not aware of. They are those product functions that provide a competitive advantage and a unique selling proposition.

Organized experimentation follows a four-step process also known as the Deming cycle. We first develop a hypothesis (plan). We then validate the hypothesis (do) and review the results (check). If the experiment was unsuccessful, we adapt the hypothesis (if required) and carry out another round of experimentation, either to refine the result or to try out a different approach (act).