I’ve stopped blogging about product management so there won’t be new content on this site in the foreseeable future. All of the content will remain here as long as WordPress sees fit to maintain it, though, so feel free to use it as you like. Also, as some of you may know, this is a backup experimental site for www.userdriven,org, which is where most of the activity has always been.

So what am I up to? Well, instead of blogging about software, I’ve started blogging about food. Over the past 3 years I’ve lost and kept off 45 pounds, got fitter, happier and had a more positive influence on my family and friends as well as on the earth.

People have often asked me how I did it and there isn’t one simple answer so I thought I would start writing down some of the insight I’ve gained through trial and error. I hope it’s useful.

You can find my new blog at www.madeofgoodfood.com. Check it out and leave your thoughts and question in the comments.

I’ve used it at work, at home and on vacation and it’s worked well for me in all contexts, so much so that I have dropped four other gadgets I was carrying in favor of the iPhone: my Blackberry, my iPod, my mini cassette recorder and my digital camera. It’s great walking around with just one slim do-it-all device in my pocket all the time. And despite a few limitations, I’m never going back. Let me give you some specifics.

At Work

Taking advantage of the iPhone’s new Exchange integration, I was quickly as productive with the new device as on my Blackberry, checking email, contacts and calendars, accepting appointments, etc. I was worried about whether I could type as well with the virtual keyboard, but I was never very good with my thumbs anyway and I’ve gotten faster with one finger on the iPhone with practice. I am probably at par for speed and accuracy at this point compared to where I was after a year plus on the BBY.

Email is actually better on the iPhone in several ways. Just the fact that it will display html email properly and that I can follow links quickly and smoothly to the web with Safari and my speedy 3G or wifi connection means that I can deal with all of my email on the device and not just some of it, as with the Blackberry. The quick swiping motion you do to delete emails is a pleasure as well. I never used to delete email from my Blackberry because it was just too many clicks. Emptying my inbox is very satisfying, and the iPhone makes that doable.

I do wish I could file work emails in my personal folders from the iPhone (the way the iPhone lets me do with Gmail). That would really let me empty out the inbox. I store my Outlook personal folders on my laptop, though, so they aren’t accessible from mobile devices. One thing I have done is to run all of my Outlook delete filters on the server so that stuff doesn’t reach the iPhone either.

Calendaring is a bit weaker than email. I can browse and accept meetings, and I can set up new appointments, but inexplicably, I can’t invite anyone else to a meeting from the iPhone. This hasn’t been an issue for me to date as I am usually at my computer when scheduling, but I do hope Apple will correct this feature deficit soon.

Also, while contacts, calendars and email synch automatically with Exchange, tasks and notes do not. The iPhone doesn’t have an included task manager but there are a number of inexpensive ones available, even one that synchs with a counterpart app on your Mac (not Windows). I am using WhatTasks on my iPhone and finding it very useful for personal tasks. It wouldn’t be up to the load of my work tasks, I don’t think, so I am still using Outlook tasks on my laptop as well.

At Home

I carry the iPhone in my pocket at home and it has proven handy there as well. It’s a better than average phone, usability-wise. Visual voice mail is a revelation after years of pressing buttons to listen through saved messages one at a time. Having a quick picklist of favorite people to dial is also easier than remembering speed dial numbers. And I like the way the phone recognizes when I have pulled it away from my ear and presents me with options to end call, turn on the speaker or whatever. That’s just very deft.

I’m a big user of Google Reader and I find I actually prefer the iPhone interface to the regular web interface. It’s cleaner and simpler and allows me to mark 15 articles as read at a time once I’ve skimmed them. And, of course, I can use it anywhere. I’m getting more reading done this way than on my laptop.

The first iPhone app I downloaded and still my favorite, though, is Remote. This allows me to control iTunes on my iMac or my AppleTV from the iPhone using an interface that looks and acts just like the iPod interface. And I don’t even have to be in the same room with the device I’m controlling. It’s about as slick as I could imagine it.

At Play

I took my shiny new iPhone on vacation for two weeks to the beach, theme parks, and a car show and here it really shone. The camera isn’t as good as my Casio Exilim Z850, but for vacation snapshots it’s more than adequate and you can’t beat the convenience. The really fun part, though, was posting my photos to MobileMe directly from the iPhone. Every time we sat down for lunch or a drink I whipped out the phone and posted a batch of photos with captions. This was entertaining for my relatives following along with our trip online and made for a lot less work when I got home.

The maps application proved extremely useful on the road as well. When it was time for dinner I would do a search for restaurants and Google would produce a list based on our current location. I could check out an eatery’s website and then get directions instantly. The directions were the usual Google Maps turn-by-turn directions, similar to what I’ve used on my Blackberry before. The coolest part, though, was watching our location dot move in real time as we drove along (or sometimes off) the recommended route in real time.

Listening to music via the iPod features is pretty much like any other iPod but with the most up to date, graphically rich interface. This was a big step up for me from my 3rd generation iPod. I haven’t made much use of the video capabilities yet but the screen is bigger and brighter than my PSP screen, something I was quite impressed with a couple of years back.

There are quite a few games available for the iPhone. I haven’t found any of them really compelling, though, the way I did PSP games when more were being made. Some of the Tetris and Gems clones make very good use of the touch interface but I’ve never found that type of game entrancing. There are marble and driving games that make use of the tilt capabilies of the iPhone but that feels much less precise than traditional gaming buttons.

One app you have to see to believe is Shazam. This little gem will analyze any music that’s playing in the world around you and identify the title and artist. After several tries with the radio I’ve yet to stump it. Once it identifies the music in question, it offers you the ability to buy and download the song from the iTunes music store then and there.

There are free apps that will let you look up people in your LinkedIn network, manage your Netflix queue, record audio memos, IM with your friends, check the weather forecast (I do this now rather than checking weather.com), search wikipedia, convert measurements, translate text – the list goes on and on. Soon I predict you’ll be able to do anything you can do on the web via your iPhone. That might not seem all that remarkable until you realize that, unlike your computer, the iPhone can be always in your pocket and (almost) always connected. I can’t over-emphasize the convenience factor in making access to all of this workable.

Issues

The software is still young, so there are some inevitable issues. Some webpages consistently cause Safari to quit. So I can’t check the train schedule on the device – at least not until they update the browser. Some apps are buggy, too. The worst thing that seems to happen, though, is that they quit and send you back to the home screen. And I’ve noticed most of the apps I run are being updated quickly, so I am hopeful these issues will get ironed out in short order. (Every time you visit the iTunes appstore you get notified of available updates and you can download and install them for free.)

Battery life was a real issue for me at first. Running 3G all the time and using the new gadget a lot, I was needing to charge twice a day. I learned a few tricks, though, that have made it workable for me. First, I use wifi where I can. I have a wireless network at home and at work (and even occasionally on the train). Wifi uses much less battery than 3G. Second, I don’t use 3G when I don’t need to. If I am away from wifi for a long period I will shut off 3G to save battery life until I need it for doing a lot of web browsing or whatnot. Edge speeds are fine for email and such. Third, I got a spare cable so I can leave one attached to my Mac for synching with iTunes and still have a charging cable in my bag for when I need it. Fourth, I got a car charger/FM tuner so I am charging when listening to music or using maps in the car. Since making these adaptations I haven’t had a battery life issue. I just charge over night while I’m synching.

AT&T’s network has occasionally been an issue for me. They’ve been running bilboard ads showing four bars everywhere and I find them funny because they are often posted in areas where I get one bar or even sometimes no service. The worst for me was visiting the Jersey Shore. From Cape May to Lakewood, I just never got a good signal. I could sometimes get email but couldn’t post a single picture in the 3 days we were there. Verizon’s network is simply more complete, at least in the northeast. That said, it hasn’t been a regular issue since I returned from vacation. I’m sure many people look forward to the day, though, when they can use their iPhone on the network that works best in their area.

I’ve heard stories about issues with MobileMe but haven’t experienced them myself. I did have an issue where after synching the iPhone for the first time, I was no longer able to authorize or synch songs bought with one of the 3 accounts attached to my iTunes. Apparenty this was a common problem for people with multiple iTunes accounts but Apple support was very responsive, apologetic and helpful in fixing the issue.

Conclusion

So in the end is the iPhone that much better than a Blackberry? Yes, it really is. Exchange integration is not yet perfect, but the speed, the display, and a real web-browser combined with the overall smoothness and ease of the interface make me look forward to using it instead of feeling forced to use it when my computer isn’t an option. And while the Blackberry was never much more than an Exchange client for me, the iPhone has also replaced my iPod, my camera and my voice recorder. And it’s made all of those functions into a seamless, more enjoyable whole. Way to go, Steve.

Now if the Photos app would just stop quitting every time I try to post a new snapshot to MobileMe a little too quickly…

The venture is called RoomEnergy and the chief product is a card reader that controls the flow of electricity to all of the systems in the room (lights, TV, HVAC). I’ve seen these kinds of things in operation in Europe. When you arrive in the room, you put your key card in the reader and all of the systems work as expected. When you leave, you take your key card with you and everything is powered off. This makes it easy and painless to be environmentally responsible without ever worrying about leaving the lights on or adjusting the thermostat. And it incidentally provides a convenient spot by the door to place your key card so you won’t lose it.

Hotels benefit immediately as well as they save on electric bills. The brilliance of this particular solution (apparently imported through a company called enocean) is that the card reader is both wireless and self-powered. This means that the installation takes about 5 minutes and there are no batteries to run down. The reader can literally be placed anywhere and requires no wiring and no holes in the wall. It actually uses the energy generated by inserting and removing the key card to power the signal to the switch to turn the power on and off. That is way cool. and it should make it a no-brainer for hotels. Want to start saving money and being green with almost no investment? Sounds good to me.

Troy Davis, who wrote in about his startup, was concerned, though, about the reaction of hotel guests. He realizes that the thing that could kill this idea dead would be if hotels thought guests disliked it or found it confusing or difficult to use. He said he’d been socializing the idea with friends and many of them thought (in his words), “they don’t worry about conservation on vacation or business trips and at $120+ per night they should be able to have the AC on minus 20 if they want to.” I confess the first time I ran into one of these devices in a hotel in Portugal I was confused as to why the lights and TV didn’t work. The card reader wasn’t labeled, though, and once it was explained I thought it was a great idea. And my guess is that the savings to hotels will be compelling enough that the devices need only be inoffensive to guests rather than a perceived benefit.

So now that I’ve biased you with my thoughts, my questions to readers of User>Driven are these:

1. What would your reaction be to a (properly labeled) device like this in your hotel room?
2. Would it make any difference if your stay was business or pleasure?
3. Can you think of ways of making the device more convenient, intuitive and/or palatable?

Post your thoughts as comments below and let’s help this idea along.

He also attributes the faster horse story I related a while back to Henry Ford. Google seems to agree with him on the source of that meme.

Thanks, John.

We asked why and and she said "The gap between [her brand] and its potential is far greater than the gap between [her brand] and it’s competitors." I thought that so well encapsulated my feelings about dealing with the competition that I would share it here.

Competitive analysis is a standard product management task and necessary sometimes. Sales people and prospects ask for feature comparisons. And when your product is closely comparable to another or when you are the discount brand, checklists can be useful for positioning. In my experience, though, much greater market success comes form staking out your own territory.

Think about it this way: would you rather have a conversation with a prospect about whether your feature list is longer than the competition’s or about the benefits the prospect will derive from your product? Which of those conversations would allow you to charge more? If you’re concentrating on market needs rather than competitive checklists, you have a chance at that second, more profitable conversation.

Similarly, would you rather spend your development efforts on duplicating the competition’s every feature so you can say "yes" when asked if you have it, or would you rather concentrate on building the features that will solve your customers’ problems? I’d much rather be thought of as great than as just better than someone else.

Building value that responds to market need puts you in partnership with your customers. They come to you to solve their problems. Getting into a checklist war with your competitors just invites your customer to look at you and the competition in the same way – to hold you both arm’s length.

So don’t be better than the competition. Be great.

One key principle they uncovered was that it was more important what process you use to develop products and services than how much you spend on it. "As in years past," they said "we found no statistically significant connection between the amount of money a company spent on innovation and its financial performance." What they found instead was getting close to customers was the key thing.

"It’s engineers and marketing product managers spending hours and hours on job sites talking to the guys who are trying to make their living with these tools," said John Schiech, President of the DeWalt division of Black & Decker, one of the subjects of the study.

DeWalt has grown from $150 million to over $2 billion in sales of their power tools since 1991 by listening closely to current customers. In field studies, for example, they observed that builders couldn’t cut large crown mouldings in one pass using traditional 10" miter saws. They brought the first commercial 12" miter saw to market, priced it a premium, and quickly found themselves with a best-seller.

Plantronics also practices market listening through focus groups and shadowing of both their corporate and consumer telephone headset customers. BAH had no specific tales of successful innovation at Plantronics, but described their process of applying "strategic filters" to help choose which products to bring to market. Those filters are all related to the expected financial performance of the products over the next 1-3 years.

The largest of these companies, Siemans AG, uses these same market listening techniques in their individual divisions but adds a greater layer of oversight, allowing them to pick and choose where to invest based on heir perception of longer term market trends such as the movement to personalized medical care, the need for portability, urbanization and other changes in demographics.

BAH tries to cast these companies in different roles, saying they are driven by customer needs, market needs and technical innovation, respectively. I don’t see that in these examples. I think each company is actively researching and responding to market needs and the differences are really just in the time-horizon each is planning for. It should be no surprise that the larger companies are looking farther out.

In the Siemans study, BAH does quote one executive saying "You’ve got to be somewhat skeptical of what they [customers] see as the technical solution, and instead depend on your own core set of people who can creatively link new technology to the future market." BAH seems to think this is unique to Siemans and other technical innovators thinking long-term. This is no different than what DeWalt did with the miter saw, though. DeWalt’s customers didn’t ask for a bigger saw, DeWalt observed the current practice of cutting each piece of molding twice and came up with a solution that saved their customers’ time. It may have been a more obvious extension of a current product, but the process of innovation in that case, like the others, was driven by observing unmet needs in the market.

This study just reinforced for me a few key principles of good product design:

• Pick your target market, both in terms of whom you are targeting and when you plan to bring the product to market
• Determine the needs of that market, ideally by studying first-hand the problems they face or that you believe they will face in your target time-frame
• Design your product to solve those problems in a way that can be brought to market affordably and profitably

It’s second nature to the experienced program managers I work with to break projects into milestones, so the idea of breaking a project into sprints seems easy to adopt. According to what we’ve read, sprints are supposed to be a short (2-4 week) cycle of work kicked off when the team agrees on a list of tasks to be attempted and finished off with a review (usually a demo) of what’s been completed.

We’ve been used to determining the milestone schedule according to the size of the tasks on our list, though. A related set of large, complex tasks should require a longer time frame than a single simpler task, right? Makes sense. Scrum says you ought to be able to break any task down into component tasks that would fit into a sprint, but why force different size tasks into an arbitrary schedule? Why try to demo something that’s only half done? Is there any reason we couldn’t have a sprint of 2 weeks followed by one of 4 and then one of 8 for a really big task?

I’ve heard a few reasons that sound credible and that we plan to test.

1. Accountability – Have you ever seen a feature stay at 90% complete for weeks with no apparent progress? Have you ever seen developers procrastinate on work with a long deadline? Rapid-fire deadlines force people to get things done efficiently for fear of looking bad at the demo.
2. Course corrections – There’s always some gap between what product manager asks for and what the engineers deliver. Frequent reviews minimize that gap by bringing the two parties together regularly even when features aren’t done. It’s easier to make changes before the feature is done, tested and documented. And without the discipline of regular check-ins it would be easy to wait until back-tracking feels like more work than it’s worth.
3. Rhythm – I’ve heard people experienced in Scrum say that a regular schedule puts them into a productive rhythm. It’s like exercise, I gather – once you get to doing it regularly you begin to expect it. It’s self-reinforcing. Developers look forward to the sprint reviews and to kicking off the next round.
4. Attaboys – Steve Johnson from Pragmatic Marketing mentioned this effect when he spoke at the BPMA recently. He likened it to the increased desire of a husband to tackle items on the "honey-do" list when he gets praise from his wife for doing them. The regular demos provide an opportunity not just for feedback on direction but for positive feedback. "Cool!" the product owner will say when they see something working (even partially), and cool the developer will feel hearing that. Will developers respond to that kind of thing. Are developers human? It’s in our nature.

It’s still under discussion but I’ll push for fixed-length sprints, the shorter the better. It seems to me the chief value in Scrum is the visibility that frequent check-ins afford, facilitating accountability, course corrections, rhythm and morale-boosting attaboys. I’ll let you all know how it goes as we dig in.

Next time I will try to write a bit about coordinating sprints and releases for an Agile project with the longer release cycle of an underlying platform.

Many of the problems we are grappling with seem to stem from trying to plan an Agile effort within a more traditional development organization. At my company, for example, projects can last for many months and doc and QA usually join a project already in progress and stay with a project after feature work is done. And unlike most developers, doc and QA folks (especially doc) are often split among several projects at once. So while some team members are ready to start daily scrums, it has been hard to include these disciplines. Our first pilot began scrumming with only the developers and a program manager turned scrum master. The doc person has since joined but is still splitting her time between two projects.

There is a general feeling of wanting to do Scrum "right" with this next pilot, so we’ve decided to wait until doc and QA can at least be part of the project kickoff where the team is supposed to review requirements and decide which features they can take on in the first sprint. Even then, commitments to other projects will mean the first few sprints in that project will have to consist of tasks not requiring doc or QA, things like tech spec writing and UI design.

At first I was uncertain about this approach. I thought one of the key principles of Scrum was that all disciplines were represented and that features were supposed to be really "done" at the end of a sprint – done as in shippable – which would, of course, require they be tested and documented. Some smart folks at Cyrus Innovation told us, though, that at least in their approach to Agile, it was more about commitments and checking progress on a regular basis than about "completing" features in each sprint.

What you put on your product backlog (the prioritized list of work for the team) doesn’t have to be limited to features. The list can include anything the team needs to accomplish to meet the goals of the product. And that can begin with designs and specs. It can also begin with only part of the team represented, it seems, though we do plan to fold all disciplines in as soon as we can.

I’m still not sure how I feel about this, but it seems in resolving the tension between two principles, one sometimes has to take precendence over the other. I will revisit this issue as we move forward with the project and let you all know how we do. 

Next time I will try to talk about scheduling sprints and releases for an Agile project in a traditional organization. 

While developers sprint through development cycles, one of three things happens to product managers. 1) They are ignored. 2) They are dragged deep into the development cycle. 3) They lead the team to build products people want to buy. The first two situations are lethal to a product manager’s career. The third alternative can lead to successful products and successful careers.

She says that "the problem seems to be that everyone is trying to wrestle control from the other" but I think the destabilizing effects of a move to agile on an organization just reveal long-standing tensions between developers who want certainty about what they are supposed to build and product managers who want flexibility to respond to changing market conditions.

In the end, she says that agile doesn’t really change the product manager’s role. They still need to "lead the team to build products people want to buy."

A key concept is that the product manager must become the market expert and the single voice of priority on the team. Rather than just reacting to the list of requirements submitted by everyone (customers, sales, support, development, executives), the market-driven product manager visits a representative set of people in the market (including non-customers) on an ongoing basis. He keeps the team focused on the targeted market segments, buyer and user personas, and problems worth solving. He conducts surveys periodically to quantify the inputs and a keeps a prioritized list of open problems to solve.

Go Barb!