Approaches to Iterating

Recall that we at Cauvin, Inc. specialize in agile product management. Most agile methods incorporate iterations. With iterations, you develop and "release" the product many times before the final release to customers. In each time-boxed iteration, you refine the requirements, design, implementation, and tests for that "release" of the product. (I'll explore in a future entry how some agile methodologies plan the tests for the product before they design and implement.)

Yet sometimes it's not immediately obvious how to divide a product development effort into iterations. Here are some approaches that we use with our clients:

Verbal Description - Flesh out use cases and verbally walk through the customer experience with prospective customers.
Mock-Up - Compose a Powerpoint presentation or other user interface and use it to demonstrate the user experience to prospective customers.
Simulation - Create a simulated environment for testing your product and demonstrate your product working in that environment.
Use Cases per Iteration - Implement just a subset of the product's use cases and demonstrate them to prospective customers.
Use Case Versions per Iteration - Implement simplified versions of the use cases your product will ultimately satisfy. Demonstrate these working versions to prospective customers.

No matter which approaches you use to divide your product development effort into iterations, try to confront uncertainties and risks (in requirements and design) in early iterations.

Comments

Why Spreadsheets Suck for Prioritizing

The Goal As a company executive, you want confidence that your product team (which includes all the people, from all departments, responsible for product success) has a sound basis for deciding which items are on the product roadmap. You also want confidence the team is prioritizing the items in a smart way. What Should We Prioritize? The items the team prioritizes could be features, user stories, epics, market problems, themes, or experiments. Melissa Perri makes an excellent case for a " problem roadmap ", and, in general, I recommend focusing on the latter types of items. However, the topic of what types of items you should prioritize - and in what situations - is interesting and important but beyond the scope of this blog entry. A Sad but Familiar Story If there is significant controversy about priorities, then almost inevitably, a product manager or other member of the team decides to put together The Spreadsheet. I've done it. Some of the mos

What Product Managers Can Learn from the Apple iPod

The Story When Apple unveiled its iPod digital music player back in October 2001, I dismissed it as a parity product . I already owned the Cowon iAUDIO CW100 MP3 player, loaded with my favorite tunes. There was Apple, generating great hype over the iPod as if it were a breakthrough product. The idea of a portable digital music player was nothing new. The first mass-produced MP3 players came out in 1998. In late 2001, the concept may have been new to a lot of Apple customers, but it wasn't new to me. I proudly showed my MP3 player to friends when they gushed about the iPod. Thus Apple's iPod was not an innovative product in and of itself. Years later, however, I realized the significance of ecosystem of which the iPod was a part. Apple had released iTunes (with technology purchased from SoundJam MP ) and created the iTunes Store for finding and downloading music. Unlike Napster , it was a safe and legal way of distributing and acquiring music. The prior way of playing

Stop Validating and Start Falsifying

The product management and startup worlds are buzzing about the importance of "validation". In this entry, I'll explain how this idea originated and why it's leading organizations astray. Why Validate? In lean startup circles, you constantly hear about "validated learning" and "validating" product ideas: The assumption is that you have a great product idea and seek validation from customers before expending vast resources to build and bring it to market. Indeed, it makes sense to transcend conventional approaches to making product decisions . Intuition, sales anecdotes, feature requests from customers, backward industry thinking, and spreadsheets don't form the basis for sound product decisions. Incorporating lean startup concepts , and a more scientific approach to learning markets, is undoubtedly a sounder approach. Moreover, in larger organizations, sometimes further in the product life-cycle, everyone seems to have an opinio

Cauvin

Search This Blog