Agile Scout » Karol McCloskey

Outside In Perspective (Series 5/5)

Karol McCloskey — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 13:15:23 +0000

The 3 B’s of Going Global: Beliefs, Behaviors, Benefits

Beliefs and behaviors are the hard part. Behavior can get to beliefs, which is cultural. – Brad White, Partner, Prophet, formerly (r)evolution

This is the last of the series “Something Innovative happened at KO HQ this Thursday”

Operating Globally? First, understand the point of view (aka needs) of consumers and then the shareholders’ point of view. The two are linked, products cannot have market success without both needs met.

It seemed all Summit speakers spoke of their successes by going into the global markets first to learn and only then to sell product. I heard loud and clear that if you spend time living in the consumers’ shoes you begin the journey into ethnography, the process by which product teams learn as consumers articulate what they need, and this drives everything else. Isn’t this hard, expensive, time consuming? What does this have to do with Agile development process?

Everything. It’s tied closely to MVP.

Beliefs

Beliefs are formed from the past, what one has experienced and they are hard to change. Beliefs are cultural and not homogeneous, tending to be regional. Beliefs drive behavior, are the basis for everyday decisions, but determining the “beliefs behind the behavior” is very difficult.

Behaviors

While it appears second on the list, behaviors are what we study first. Behaviors can get you to underlying beliefs because they are seen and can be evaluated. Start with watching your new target’s behaviors and begin to tease out the belief systems. Be aware that we tend to apply our own deeply held assumptions to why another is behaving. This will not provide good information because behaviors are beliefs in action and beliefs are cultural bound. Be honest about your outcomes, avoid stereotyping.

Benefits

The prize for all this research is understanding the new consumers and their unique needs in order to provide products and services they want and will buy.

>>An iterative process, requiring openness to forgetting all you “knew” to accepting all the “new.” <<

Outside In Perspective (Series 5/5)

Wearing the Pink*

Karol McCloskey — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 12:15:09 +0000

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month

Just said goodbye to Heidi.

Welcome back to Meg.

Keeping watch with Alison.

Learned Taekwondo with Joyce.

Laughing with my FBFF Charlene.

Putting friends’ names to a statistic is to honor their battle, their strength.

Many are in this fight, either as practicioner or patient or family or friend or colleague at work.

All should be applauded as we defeat this disease once and for all.

*Football players wear pink shoes in support of Breast Cancer Awareness Month

Wearing the Pink*

An Hypothesis is Really a Prototype [Series 4/5]

Karol McCloskey — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 12:15:53 +0000

Agile as the Innovator

Thought bytes

Don’t think research is a phase, it is really ongoing. Prototyping is the way you learn. You learn so much by watching how people learn. It’s OK if the prototype is really rough.

Rapid prototyping your guesses* is an iterative process. You learn just enough to feed into building a better prototype. Then you go out and learn more, build again.

Launching is validating how much more solving is needed. If not solving the problem, re-calibrate.

Service design seems similar to product design – but it is harder to prototype an “experience.”

Product design creates an experience. ID the real issues.

Key is have a clear objective of what you are trying to find out.

Think about the smallest thing you need to do to get the most learning – throughout the entire life-cycle.

Storyboards! Stories describe a type of interaction.

Always design for people.

* My note: a simple word for hypothesis?

Next up: Outside in Perspective

An Hypothesis is Really a Prototype [Series 4/5]

Innovation by Immersion [Series 3/5]

Karol McCloskey — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 12:15:28 +0000

Experience is the Message

People have experiences about product, products don’t have experiences. - Marcelo Marer, Chief Creative Director, Intel Media

What sells well in the U.S. many not be a benefit to anyone elsewhere. If you sell globally, it’s critical to design products for the new markets you plan to enter. Doing so requires research and an honest/thorough analysis of the information you have collected.

User Stories and User Personas

In the previous blog, the product teams hypothesized their customers and prospects need to collaborate - on demand, from anywhere – with their partners and other growers, in order to be more productive and to reduce risk.

But the product teams didn’t know for sure if this was true for all of the users. This company sells their farm equipment product globally, including into emerging-markets in China and Africa. The needs of these emerging-markets growers was not well defined.

The product teams needed to create personas for each of the growers in each market, to sort out the unique needs of the many complex roles and to create robust user stories to build innovative products. They had to visit the growers personally.

Day in the Life of a Grower

Multiple teams were sent to live with growers at their farms for three weeks. The task – watch and record (written and video) what the growers did every day. The goal – to determine what was important to each of the visited growers and build stories and product plans.

The teams found that if they asked questions on “what did you find difficult” the answer was very different from what the video showed. And if asked “what did you like” it was often difficult for the grower to articulate this. Best practice hint: when in the field/interviewing, use multiple data capturing methods. This helps business teams as they review and analyze the research later. It can clearly indicate what needs clarification or additional study, reducing the risk of getting it wrong.

Outcomes

Teams learned that growers in both emerging and developed economies were familiar with and used mobile technology. They also learned that wireless technologies on a farm and in farm equipment had to withstand harsh conditions. This wasn’t surprising to the team, but the first insights were.

The product teams used what they now know and produced MVP products, getting better as they learned to create additional value. Having feet on the street, as these teams did, can clarify what is uniquely important to global customers.

This team may not say they are Agile practioners, but they are.

Tee’d up> An Hypothesis is Really a Prototype

Innovation by Immersion [Series 3/5]

From Iron to Cloud – Customer Driven Innovation [Series 2/5]

Karol McCloskey — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 12:15:00 +0000

Customer Driven Innovation: A Global Perspective

Changing iron by using the cloud

Growers (Matt rarely called his customers “farmers”) are a uniquely tenacious and optimistic group. They have to be risk takers too, so many out-of-their-control environmental factors impact outcomes. You might never guess that this group is well set to innovate/change how they farm.

The head of Product Management explained that today’s growers, in order to feed the many billion of us, must find ways to limit their risk and increase their yield. They’ve already teased out most of their farming costs from fuel (which impacts feed, fertilizer and other necessary items on the farm). More was needed to be done – there are hungry people to feed.

Matt’s teams hypothesized that growers need to be able to collaborate – on demand, from anywhere they were working – with partners, such as the extension agent or the feed vendor. Their equipment too had to become smart, either sensing a part needing replacement, or actually replacing drivers as tractors convoy across fields.

Wireless ! It became apparent that iron was going to bend to the cloud

The company is described as a pure-play agriculture company. They make farm equipment. They work in iron and they are good at that. They had no long-term experience integrating wireless devices within the working environment of their customers. It was first time at bat for the team.

One challenge was finding ways to implement wireless technology in areas of rough work and tougher dirt conditions. Concerns were raised about availability of wireless access in the emerging world. Could the team create new products for these growers using innovative wireless connectivity?

Next up - Innovating by immersion

From Iron to Cloud – Customer Driven Innovation [Series 2/5]

Going Global – PDMA Georgia [Series 1/5]

Karol McCloskey — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 12:15:32 +0000

Something innovative happened again at KO HQ this Thursday

The PDMA| Georgia chapter held it’s 9th annual Summit - topics were global in scope but personal in focus. Much shared learning and best practices offered. A very good reason to step away from desks/deliverables and come together with like-minded product professionals.

Innovators may already be intuitively using Agile

Top-line takeaways from the Round Table

Get a handle on things that bite in your planning stage, not during execution (import laws, regulations)
RESONATE! – don’t just BE in the chosen markets (do provide consistency, quality, awesome user experience)
Create RELEVANCY- use everything around your product to do this
LISTEN, partner with a local - help your prospects ARTICULATE their unique drivers
Walk a mile in their shoes is STEP ONE – learn your biases and “things you don’t know you don’t know”
When you KNOW your customer, only then modify your product
Think INCREMENTALLY - message first before modifying product is a successful strategy
ADAPT - iterate as you learn more
MEASURE your successes and failures – learn from each lesson

Tying these back to Agile Marketing practice

Iteration planning
User stories
Collaboration
Personas
MVP
Continuous improvements
Iteration review

Interesting?

Next up - How a company in the iron age remade itself by learning their customers’ unique drivers

Going Global – PDMA Georgia [Series 1/5]

Stuckness – Getting Unstuck by Thinking Agile

Karol McCloskey — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 12:39:05 +0000

I create my own sticking points …found my own fingerprints all over the crime scene. I have no clue how I’ve been so uniquely blessed with this ability to hog-tie myself without ever catching on that I’m doing the tying again. – David A Schmaltz, Pure Schmaltz

Stuckness...

Think of it as the superglue of life, or the Georgia clay of hikers and gardeners. Whatever it is, Stuckness bonds us to what we know and experienced. Isn’t that good?

Yes and No

Depends upon the outcome. What do you do when you are in Stuckness? Do you stop as in “deer in the headlights” – do you flail and are now going under!

Do you instead settle your adrenaline and think through the challenges, see the common elements, compare them with your former successes? (thanks Seth)

Stuckness is a good place, a teaching place. It’s a place to ponder, to look for other paths and decide which to take.Yet, Stuckness is current and also rooted in the past. To move forward and away from Stuckness, be aware of obstacles in your view, such as always taking the “logical” approach.

Sometimes that wee voice of your intuition should be heard.

Cheers!

Stuckness – Getting Unstuck by Thinking Agile

If a Customer Asks “Can You Hear Me?” Will Anyone Hear?

Karol McCloskey — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 12:15:19 +0000

When we stopped doing customer development, we stopped learning. @LeanCircle

To some, I’m a Suit. The only Development I ever did included using Lotus 1-2-3′s macro language to build applications and a business. I know only a few things about building successful applications for customers; how – I totally get customer development.

These things are clear to me:

You don’t build stuff (applications, databases, software, apps, websites) for yourself. You build these things for your customer.
Get out of the building. It’s the only way to make sure you aren’t just hearing yourself/ talking to yourself.
Few technologies fail because they’re not good stuff. Instead, they fail because they don’t solve customers’ problems.
You are not your customer, so you don’t know what their problems are.
Get out of the building. It’s the only way to make sure you aren’t building cool stuff that only you can love.

Customer Development

These are awesome and interesting words joined together. It doesn’t mean go out and speak with as many customers as possible. That’s nuts, instead go Lean. Speak with as many customers as possible who help your teams build MVP. If you cannot find any customers…well maybe this isn’t a problem to solve. Just saying!

If a Customer Asks “Can You Hear Me?” Will Anyone Hear?

Strategic MVP and Iterations

Karol McCloskey — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 12:15:59 +0000

Each strategic project is a set of related user stories – Liz Rice, MindTheProduct

The lively discussion continues around exactly how strategic is Agile if you constantly run short Sprints. Doesn’t it take longer to be strategic?

Actually no…The two concepts (Agile & Strategic) are not mutually exclusive! I read a very interesting article this weekend by Liz Rice who outlines exactly HOW to do this. She’s keen on being realistic and keeping on track.

Liz advocates using a roadmap and planning to prioritize User Stories needed to build the MVP, keeping in mind that it is best to not bog down in details. Plan for the predictable things and get buy-in from your development teams. We all know priorties can and will change, that’s what Agile does so well. Don’t sweat the small stuff but remember if you don’t consciously integrate critical MVP “must have” features into the Quarterly Plan you’ll be forever dealing only with short-term and “urgent” requests.

And that’s no way to develop world class software.

Strategic MVP and Iterations

Why Customers Still Need Voices

Karol McCloskey — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 12:15:16 +0000

You’d think customers’ communications with product management and product marketing is way better now with Social – probably so but when are the voices actually being heard by the PM department? Depends on who’s managing the Twitter and Facebook accounts, right? And that job is probably with big “M” marketing. Don’t get me wrong, I love these guys but another layer for customer voices to filter through is just too much!

Sooner is always better.

Collaborate with Customers. It’s fair to say Agile methods are all about collaborating directly with customers while building a product rather than negotiating features after the fact. Question is – how do you reach customers? and more importantly how can a customer reach you first?

Feedback. Working Agile is not about producing stuff quickly. Instead it’s about listening and learning. Then, it’s about performing and asking “how’d we do?” Improve as needed, producing things well, worth your customers’ while. Listen always.

Talk with me. I’m interested to find out what customer voice, customer feedback tools are used by Agile Product Teams. What works, what doesn’t? Has anyone build a home grown solution?

Cheers!

Why Customers Still Need Voices