At the August meeting of the Silicon Valley Product Management Association (SVPMA), Jennifer Turcotte and Dione K. Bailey, Ph.D from Complete Genomics, Inc. provided a comprehensive discussion of what is required to successfully transition from product management in high tech to the Life Sciences industry.
Jennifer Turcotte, vice president of marketing at Complete Genomics, drew upon 15 years of enterprise software and biotechnology marketing and product management experience with both venture-funded startups and public companies. Jennifer currently directs all product management and marketing activities at Complete Genomics including strategic product planning, product marketing, market entry strategy, marketing communications, branding and public relations. She has held senior product marketing positions at SAP, Siperian, Ariba and BEA. Jennifer holds a B.Eng. in mechanical engineering from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.
Dione K. Bailey, Ph.D. is the Director of Product Management at Complete Genomics, Inc. She joined Complete Genomics in 2009 where she focuses on requirements gathering and improvements to existing products and strategies that impact the direction of future products. Prior to joining Complete Genomics, Dr. Bailey was the Product Manager for CGH/CNV microarrays at Agilent Technologies. Dr. Bailey was at Affymetrix for 5 years where she started as a Postdoctoral Fellow and also served as a Genomics Collaborations Scientist and Application Scientist. Dr. Bailey has 14 years of experience in the life sciences market. She holds a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Delaware and a B.S. in chemistry from the College of New Jersey. Dr. Bailey has co-authored articles that appeared in Science, Cell, Cancer Research, The American Journal of Human Genetics and Genome Research.
Dr. Baily began with an introduction to Complete Genomics, explaining that they are a life sciences tools company, not a diagnostics or medical devices company. The goal at Complete Genomics is to provide large scale and affordable complete human genome sequencing as a service to enable the large scale research of the genetic mechanisms underlying complex diseases and drug response. As a small start-up company, their biggest challenges, from a product management perspective, are the highly competitive market comprised of a small number of amply sized, fierce competitors and the multi-disciplinary technology required to provide DNA sequencing of human genomes. Domain knowledge of bio-chemistry, hardware, software, bioinformatics and genetics is essential because they sell to PhD level research scientists.
Regulatory considerations are a factor in the life sciences industry, however they do not currently affect Complete Genomics since their customers are not doctors or CLIA labs (testing laboratories affected by the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments). However, if and when DNA sequencing becomes a diagnostic test or part of standard care, it will require FDA regulation. FDA regulation will severely impact product management’s role in product lifecycle management given the rigorous reporting and clinical trials necessary. Product Marketing is also inhibited by FDA regulation in restrictions of who you can sell to, how you can market, what you can and cannot say about the product. These are not common issues in high tech product management.
Dr. Baily referenced bay area companies focusing on personal genomics services, Navigenics and 23andMe. They provide analysis of personal genomes to individuals for use in predictive medicine. They use the information produced by personal genomics techniques for making decisions on medical treatments, such as type of treatment or drug and appropriate dosage for a particular individual. The companies require genetic counselors to help interpret the results. Currently these sequencing tests and results are considered a regulatory gray zone for the FDA. All have received warning letters from the FDA asserting that the gene-analysis systems the companies are using are medical devices that must be regulated.
The presentation focus shifted to the differences between the Life Sciences Tools and High Tech industries. The life science tools industry does not utilize industry analysts as is done in high tech – instead there are key opinion leaders who are renowned, leading scientists who influence customers’ buying decisions. Selling to scientists requires facts, proof and validation and credibility. “Scientific meetings” are considered closed events where scientists interact with scientists to share research. Scientific meetings are not a conference, trade show or event and no venders are present. News is provided under embargo and opinion leaders are treated equal to journalists and put in touch with R&D directly for peer-to-peer discussion.
Life science companies rarely employ complex selling or unique marketing tactics because scientists are only interested in the features and functions of the products. They are aware of all the offerings available since it is a small industry where everyone knows everyone, and the marketing grows out of research and development. In life science companies, buyers will purchase every solution they can acquire to advance their research. Comparatively, in the high tech world, briefing and influencing industry analysts is critical to the marketing strategy. Sales require differentiated positioning and messaging, competitive intelligence and sales tools to highlight product offerings. Product management and product marketing are understood and valued in high tech companies when compared to life sciences.
Regarding research and development in high tech, product management is often brought in half-way through development to steer the final product feature set, run the alpha/beta testing and launch the product. This may be three to six months after launch of the company. In a start-up life sciences tools company, R&D works for many years without any marketing or product management. R&D is often multi-disciplinary and it takes longer to transition to a commercial organization. Dr. Baily suggested that bringing in product management to help drive the way products are developed, marketed and sold by focusing on the problems of the market rather than the features of the product is optimal.
Typically in high tech, product management and product marketing have separate but coordinated roles even in small companies. Developers want product managers to prioritize requirements; marketing people want product managers to write copy; sales people want product managers for demo after demo. Product managers are so busy supporting the other departments they have no time remaining for actual product management. But just because the product manager is an expert in the product doesn’t mean no one else needs product expertise. Product marketing must work alongside product management to fill in the more tactical outbound role. Successful companies clearly define the distinct roles of product manager and product marketing, and they work together to maximize sales revenue, market share and profits.
Successful products come from companies that know the market and its problems. Strong dedicated product management is necessary to provide nimble product development and highly differentiated products with a strong value proposition within highly competitive, rapidly evolving markets. It is important to keep product management focused on strategic product direction while simultaneously ensuring that vital tactical activities are managed, including providing consistent messaging to customers, sales support, marketing programs, industry analysts and the press. One person is unlikely to have the bandwidth to do both jobs well.
In Life sciences, the product manager is often responsible for both product management and product marketing, yet it’s difficult to find one person who can do both roles well who also has domain expertise. Each role is critical and necessitates different skills and talents. Due to the technical nature of the buyer who is a scientist, product management in life sciences requires someone with more scientific background than marketing training. Marketing training in life sciences comes from on-the-job training which prevents much out of the box thinking.
Being a product manager in a life sciences company often requires a PhD which makes it difficult to transition from other industries. Domain knowledge in life sciences requires understanding of the customer’s problem in depth. Requirements are often technically focused and detailed (i.e. requires molecular biology, genetics background and understanding). This is not solution selling as the only thing differentiating one product from another are the technical product features and most buyers purchase solutions from more than one vendor. Many researchers from R&D within life sciences transition from a technical development role into a marketing role.
In high tech, domain knowledge is secondary to product management and customer facing experience. Jennifer Turcotte told the story of when Ariba decided to hire purchasing managers from their customer channel to help guide product management, assuming they would convey what drove their purchasing decisions to enhance the product development process. The experiment was an utter failure because purchase managers couldn’t translate their job into product requirements, they were not skilled as product managers. In high tech it is often important to have business to business or business to customer product management experience as well as business acumen. Jennifer talked about when she was in enterprise software and wanted to move away from enterprise to a consumer-oriented business like Yahoo, Google, Adobe, but lacked consumer experience. She thought it was weird that she was a consumer yet couldn’t represent one when she represented B2B software but was never a business. Sometimes things aren’t logical and you have to find a way to breakdown these misconceptions.
Ms. Turcotte discussed social media where bloggers are emerging as a key media audience. Many life science tools companies believe they don’t need to participate in social media marketing because their products or services are not customer facing. Whereas in high tech an integrated approach that includes social media like blogging, Facebook or twitter is second nature. Customers, decision makers, influencers and investors are all participating online and companies need to actively listen to what is being discussed in this arena. She shared she will pre-brief key reporters and key bloggers. She treats key bloggers with the same respect and inclusion given to the press because they are read by customers who are often more knowledgeable than the reporters.
Jennifer tackled the challenge of changing industries, not roles in your career progression as a product manager. Really understand why you want a change and what is motivating that change. Research new careers and key companies, identify transferrable skills, network and find a mentor. Be flexible with location, role and salary. Changing roles within a life science organization to transition from R&D to marketing requires patience. Take the time to learn the basics and grow into the role. Don’t be afraid to ask your marketing peers for advice and help. Expect on the job training. Some companies will contribute to MBA and other training programs.
To transition industries, set a goal and map out a plan with steps and milestones. Satisfaction is found when playing to your strengths and passions. Try to determine how the role you are in now will get you to your next goal. Leverage your network immediately and look for peers who have made a similar move. You’ll need to be flexible about nearly everything, from your employment status to relocation and salary. Set positive goals for yourself, but expect setbacks and change. Besides a totally new career, you might also consider a lateral move that could serve as a springboard.
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Saturday, July 3, 2010
Why Have A Strategy?
At the May meeting of the Silicon Valley Product Management Association, Barbara Nelson presented an interactive session demonstrating the vital necessity of developing and executing on a product strategy even in a climate of rapidly changing market influences and survival mode conditions. Drawing upon more than 20 years of experience in the software industry, Ms. Nelson speaks as an evangelist for market-driven products. Prior to joining Pragmatic Marketing as an instructor in 2000, Barbara served in product management and marketing positions for an enterprise accounting and finance software company. As vice president of product marketing, she worked closely with product managers, marketers and developers, showing the value of using market facts over opinions. She attributes her success to actively listening to the market in order to build products people want to buy.
Refreshingly, Barbara began with an allegory about a friend returning from their uncle’s funeral with boxes of pictures from his life. Her friend was in a quandary about what to do with the pictures. None of the pictures were labeled. The friend tossed all the boxes of pictures as they had no meaning to her and no one in the family could identify the people photographed.
Ms. Nelson suggested that the issue of organizing photographs from a lifetime has not gotten simpler with the availability of new software and technology – rather it has gotten easier to capture photos in an unwieldy fashion and store them in a myriad of digital locations. She suggested that solving the problem of organizing pictures is a real life dilemma requiring product management skills. Start with identifying themes in the pictures. You could take a waterfall approach to proceed in a sequential manner from the bigger “picture” assuming that all the pictures are quality and worth keeping, then break down the problem into smaller projects, identify the method for determining where the pictures will be filed, the file names, and then proceed to label and place the pictures appropriately. Or take an Agile approach by organically sorting pictures based on the themes and subject matter, quality, sentimental value, frequently adapting filenames and organization choices as more pictures are reviewed and recurring patterns are recognized.
Transitioning from this universal issue, Ms. Nelson inquired “What is your personal strategy?” Is it “I have a vision: our product is for anybody, anywhere, anytime.”? She stated emphatically that product management requires both strategies and tactics. But faced with deadlines, what is the need for strategy if progress is being made? The market changes so rapidly it’s impossible to execute on a strategy. We’re in survival mode. We take every deal that comes along. The executives don’t agree on a strategy so how can we execute one? Our developers think the strategy is flawed so they have stealth projects. Strategy takes time that we don’t have. Connecting the detailed tasks to the strategy slows down execution. We can’t afford to stop executing for a minute because we have limited time, money, and resources. During these tough economic times, our philosophy is to just do it!
Ms. Nelson’s overall message is that PMs don’t have the luxury of working on the wrong tactics. Good strategy helps you filter out bad tactics so you can focus on what is most important to your long-term viability in the market. The PM is the President of the Product, although in reality a PM may experience being the janitor of the product. A company’s original vision created income for the founders, who solved a problem that they experienced firsthand. The challenge is to figure out how to get to the next product, and the CEO has to transition to strategizing for the company and away from tactical details.
Strategy helps you figure out what NOT to do. Research into companies identifies that only 5% of employees are familiar with the company’s strategy. How do they know what to do to move the company forward? Things change when you move from strategy to execution. You must determine where you are trying to go, what mountain you are trying to climb. The work being done is the defacto strategy – does it connect to the vision? Every level of planning MUST connect to the strategy: Vision, Product, Release, Tasks. Find a problem in the market for which there is no solution and make sure it fits with the overall company direction.
A good PM is involved in the release and feature set of a product. Prioritizing backlog is tactical. Prioritizing themes is strategic and guides tactics. Do the detailed tasks connect all the way back to higher management? PM requires communication at the executive level and trust between layers of management. You must identify if there is a gap between strategy and execution, or worse between the executives and the sales, marketing and development functions. Product Management falls between strategy and execution and must provide simultaneous interpretation within that gap or risk becoming “demo boy”.
At this point, Ms. Nelson broke the audience into groups to do a “Force Field Analysis”. The instructions were to come up with two to three driving forces that have positive impact in closing the gap as a product manager, and two to three constraining forces that prevent product management from operating successfully. The product managers, product marketers, engineers, entrepreneurs and other interested parties in attendance were quite vocal and animated in this discussion. The small groups came back together to share results of the discussion.
A list of what works included:
1. Involving the team with users and use cases including UI and QA for buy-in from the beginning
2. Providing rewards and incentives to the developers to acknowledge and reinforce desired contributions
3. Ongoing market sensing activities
4. Clear goals and milestones that the entire team understands
Other positive driving forces were;
• a culture of honesty, integrity, transparency and trust
• good executive leadership, internal communication and technical skill set
• clear understanding of market trends and opportunities
• customer input without intermediaries
The list of Constraining forces included;
• Not having a common language in the vernacular of doing business
• Outsourcing challenges that don’t always save money – even if it appears that it does on paper
• Customer requirements confused between key customers versus markets of customers
Ms. Nelson was adept at reframing the constraints into the constructive opportunities for the product manager to provide given pervasive problems, such as:
• Identify patterns that are repeatable for customized features
• Distill down commonalities to figure out how to deal with nuances
• Challenge engineers to build tools, APIs
Regarding constraints on time:
• Cut features
• Present value calculations, tradeoffs
• Utilize conjoint analysis
Recognize that the product manager is the messenger for the market and must bring market data to enable the executives to make the right decisions. The PM must consistently stay on course and communicate often with management. “You can’t do everything. You can’t even do the compelling many.” Therefore the PM must focus on the vital few. The closer you are to the sales process, the more difficult it is to make product tradeoffs. Sales depend on individual deals and ultimately want products the market wants to buy, so the PM must provide a higher view of sales to many. The PM must assess the market as big enough and teach sales to recognize the right fits to stuff their pipeline.
The PM articulates the distinctive competence of the company’s unique, sustainable value. PMs figure out drivers in market segments using data, not opinions. “Your opinion, although interesting, is irrelevant.” PMs identify the market segment that values what you do that the competitors don’t do well. Delight user personas by solving their problems – figure out why the customer wants to buy. Regularly use Win/Loss Analysis to validate why your product is winning and losing. Continuously connect strategy to execution with post mortem corrections and quarterly road map reviews.
Perform Agile retrospectives by questioning:
• What did we say we would do?
• What did we do?
• What’s next?
• What are the barriers?
Ms. Nelson’s bottom line education for a PM is to be consistently immersed in high value activities that
• Provide market feedback to help you adapt and improve along the way
• Drive alignment between executives and workers
• Communicate the strategic vision to marketing, sales, development
• Show leadership by bringing market expertise to the strategic planning process.
• Align your team around a strategic vision to drive execution towards building products people want to buy.
“Management is doing things right. Leadership is doing the right things.” Peter Drucker
Refreshingly, Barbara began with an allegory about a friend returning from their uncle’s funeral with boxes of pictures from his life. Her friend was in a quandary about what to do with the pictures. None of the pictures were labeled. The friend tossed all the boxes of pictures as they had no meaning to her and no one in the family could identify the people photographed.
Ms. Nelson suggested that the issue of organizing photographs from a lifetime has not gotten simpler with the availability of new software and technology – rather it has gotten easier to capture photos in an unwieldy fashion and store them in a myriad of digital locations. She suggested that solving the problem of organizing pictures is a real life dilemma requiring product management skills. Start with identifying themes in the pictures. You could take a waterfall approach to proceed in a sequential manner from the bigger “picture” assuming that all the pictures are quality and worth keeping, then break down the problem into smaller projects, identify the method for determining where the pictures will be filed, the file names, and then proceed to label and place the pictures appropriately. Or take an Agile approach by organically sorting pictures based on the themes and subject matter, quality, sentimental value, frequently adapting filenames and organization choices as more pictures are reviewed and recurring patterns are recognized.
Transitioning from this universal issue, Ms. Nelson inquired “What is your personal strategy?” Is it “I have a vision: our product is for anybody, anywhere, anytime.”? She stated emphatically that product management requires both strategies and tactics. But faced with deadlines, what is the need for strategy if progress is being made? The market changes so rapidly it’s impossible to execute on a strategy. We’re in survival mode. We take every deal that comes along. The executives don’t agree on a strategy so how can we execute one? Our developers think the strategy is flawed so they have stealth projects. Strategy takes time that we don’t have. Connecting the detailed tasks to the strategy slows down execution. We can’t afford to stop executing for a minute because we have limited time, money, and resources. During these tough economic times, our philosophy is to just do it!
Ms. Nelson’s overall message is that PMs don’t have the luxury of working on the wrong tactics. Good strategy helps you filter out bad tactics so you can focus on what is most important to your long-term viability in the market. The PM is the President of the Product, although in reality a PM may experience being the janitor of the product. A company’s original vision created income for the founders, who solved a problem that they experienced firsthand. The challenge is to figure out how to get to the next product, and the CEO has to transition to strategizing for the company and away from tactical details.
Strategy helps you figure out what NOT to do. Research into companies identifies that only 5% of employees are familiar with the company’s strategy. How do they know what to do to move the company forward? Things change when you move from strategy to execution. You must determine where you are trying to go, what mountain you are trying to climb. The work being done is the defacto strategy – does it connect to the vision? Every level of planning MUST connect to the strategy: Vision, Product, Release, Tasks. Find a problem in the market for which there is no solution and make sure it fits with the overall company direction.
A good PM is involved in the release and feature set of a product. Prioritizing backlog is tactical. Prioritizing themes is strategic and guides tactics. Do the detailed tasks connect all the way back to higher management? PM requires communication at the executive level and trust between layers of management. You must identify if there is a gap between strategy and execution, or worse between the executives and the sales, marketing and development functions. Product Management falls between strategy and execution and must provide simultaneous interpretation within that gap or risk becoming “demo boy”.
At this point, Ms. Nelson broke the audience into groups to do a “Force Field Analysis”. The instructions were to come up with two to three driving forces that have positive impact in closing the gap as a product manager, and two to three constraining forces that prevent product management from operating successfully. The product managers, product marketers, engineers, entrepreneurs and other interested parties in attendance were quite vocal and animated in this discussion. The small groups came back together to share results of the discussion.
A list of what works included:
1. Involving the team with users and use cases including UI and QA for buy-in from the beginning
2. Providing rewards and incentives to the developers to acknowledge and reinforce desired contributions
3. Ongoing market sensing activities
4. Clear goals and milestones that the entire team understands
Other positive driving forces were;
• a culture of honesty, integrity, transparency and trust
• good executive leadership, internal communication and technical skill set
• clear understanding of market trends and opportunities
• customer input without intermediaries
The list of Constraining forces included;
• Not having a common language in the vernacular of doing business
• Outsourcing challenges that don’t always save money – even if it appears that it does on paper
• Customer requirements confused between key customers versus markets of customers
Ms. Nelson was adept at reframing the constraints into the constructive opportunities for the product manager to provide given pervasive problems, such as:
• Identify patterns that are repeatable for customized features
• Distill down commonalities to figure out how to deal with nuances
• Challenge engineers to build tools, APIs
Regarding constraints on time:
• Cut features
• Present value calculations, tradeoffs
• Utilize conjoint analysis
Recognize that the product manager is the messenger for the market and must bring market data to enable the executives to make the right decisions. The PM must consistently stay on course and communicate often with management. “You can’t do everything. You can’t even do the compelling many.” Therefore the PM must focus on the vital few. The closer you are to the sales process, the more difficult it is to make product tradeoffs. Sales depend on individual deals and ultimately want products the market wants to buy, so the PM must provide a higher view of sales to many. The PM must assess the market as big enough and teach sales to recognize the right fits to stuff their pipeline.
The PM articulates the distinctive competence of the company’s unique, sustainable value. PMs figure out drivers in market segments using data, not opinions. “Your opinion, although interesting, is irrelevant.” PMs identify the market segment that values what you do that the competitors don’t do well. Delight user personas by solving their problems – figure out why the customer wants to buy. Regularly use Win/Loss Analysis to validate why your product is winning and losing. Continuously connect strategy to execution with post mortem corrections and quarterly road map reviews.
Perform Agile retrospectives by questioning:
• What did we say we would do?
• What did we do?
• What’s next?
• What are the barriers?
Ms. Nelson’s bottom line education for a PM is to be consistently immersed in high value activities that
• Provide market feedback to help you adapt and improve along the way
• Drive alignment between executives and workers
• Communicate the strategic vision to marketing, sales, development
• Show leadership by bringing market expertise to the strategic planning process.
• Align your team around a strategic vision to drive execution towards building products people want to buy.
“Management is doing things right. Leadership is doing the right things.” Peter Drucker
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Silicon Valley Product Managers Association News
I reported on two recent product management events:
Monday, May 10, 2010
Google Scholar
An important part of product management is culling data and research about industries and products to identify market opportunities to develop product line swot, conjoint or competitive market analysis and road map presentations. One of the tools I use to keep updated is Google Alerts, which sends me an email every time something is added to the web about my identified interests.
Thank you Panos Ipeirotis, A Computer Scientist in Business School, for your most recent posting that Google Scholar now Supports Email Alerts
Google Scholar is a search on scholarly literature and research.
Try it here:
Thank you Panos Ipeirotis, A Computer Scientist in Business School, for your most recent posting that Google Scholar now Supports Email Alerts
Google Scholar is a search on scholarly literature and research.
Features of Google Scholar
- Find articles, theses, books, abstracts or court opinions
- Locate the complete document through your library or on the web
- Learn about key scholarly literature in any area of research
Google acknowledges that much of scholarly research involves building on what others have already discovered. It's taken from Sir Isaac Newton's famous quote, "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
Try it here:
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Entrepreneurs Flood San Jose for Startup Weekend
Thanks to Chapin Hansen for reporting on the Startup weekend. Following is a copy of his blog posting at:
Entrepreneurs Flood San Jose for Startup Weekend
2) Find Fun/Competent People - You're spending 2 straight days with these people, you might as well pick a group you like. On top of that, look for people that have complimentary skills and are competent. Working with fun, smart people makes everything easier.
3) Outline/Explain the project immediately - It's important to talk about the idea because everyone needs to understand it. If a few people don't get it, the team becomes weaker. Making sure everyone understands it means that they will be able to contribute in a positive way.
4) Throw out new ideas - Especially in this 2 day adventure, throw out ideas that make the product stand out. You have 2 days, don't be conservative. Come up with ideas that are wacky and that will get people's attention. You can always change it later.
5) Everyone needs to constantly Talk - I know it's only 2 days and everyone is cranking it out, but marketers need to talk to coders/designers and vice versa. Everyone needs to moving along together or else people aren't working on the right stuff or being as helpful as they can be. When programmers finish something, marketers should test it. When marketers write something or come up with an idea, they should mention it so it can be implemented before it's too late.
Overall, it was an awesome experience and one that I would recommend to everyone who is interested in startups. Thanks to Franck and the Startup weekend team for putting the event on. (and filling us with lots of Pizza Hut)
----------------------
I developed and presented this product at the weekend, working with Catherine on Friday and Saturday, and with help from Project Team 42, Justin and Adina on Sunday.
Entrepreneurs Flood San Jose for Startup Weekend
Nic and I (the menuvore guys) have been working to get ourselves involved in the startup community, so we headed down to San Jose to attend 'Startup Weekend'. In short, you pitch an idea, try to form a team and then work your ass off for 2 days in an attempt to have the product up and running by Sunday night to demo for a panel of well known startup judges.
With that being said, here is what I learned from this event.
1) Pitch an idea - it takes you out of your comfort zone and who knows, it might be something someone else wants to be a part of. Lots of ideas were pitched, some good, some not so good. I pitched one and it didn't go anywhere, but I'm glad I threw it out there.
2) Find Fun/Competent People - You're spending 2 straight days with these people, you might as well pick a group you like. On top of that, look for people that have complimentary skills and are competent. Working with fun, smart people makes everything easier.
4) Throw out new ideas - Especially in this 2 day adventure, throw out ideas that make the product stand out. You have 2 days, don't be conservative. Come up with ideas that are wacky and that will get people's attention. You can always change it later.
5) Everyone needs to constantly Talk - I know it's only 2 days and everyone is cranking it out, but marketers need to talk to coders/designers and vice versa. Everyone needs to moving along together or else people aren't working on the right stuff or being as helpful as they can be. When programmers finish something, marketers should test it. When marketers write something or come up with an idea, they should mention it so it can be implemented before it's too late.
Overall, it was an awesome experience and one that I would recommend to everyone who is interested in startups. Thanks to Franck and the Startup weekend team for putting the event on. (and filling us with lots of Pizza Hut)
----------------------
I developed and presented this product at the weekend, working with Catherine on Friday and Saturday, and with help from Project Team 42, Justin and Adina on Sunday.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Everything you wanted to KNOL about Software Manifestos!
I collected over 25 different software development related manifestos and placed them into Google's Knol platform to encourage discussion between developers, designers, product managers, and marketers.
My process was first to capture their relationships in a mindmap and try to standardize the format to make it easier to compare them. It was similar to researching a competitive space for a product and then attempting to organize the information in order to make valid observations and identify challenges and opportunities. The information, since it was text based with more than 7 levels of detail, became too unwieldy to share in a graphical form. Google Knol provided a great platform to share all of the manifestos and encourage discussion. A cross between a blog and wiki, Knol was very easy to set up and use.
Join the conversation, contribute your insights - what do manifestos reveal about the nature of software product development?
I will return to develop a taxonomy to further the discussion of the manifestos.
My process was first to capture their relationships in a mindmap and try to standardize the format to make it easier to compare them. It was similar to researching a competitive space for a product and then attempting to organize the information in order to make valid observations and identify challenges and opportunities. The information, since it was text based with more than 7 levels of detail, became too unwieldy to share in a graphical form. Google Knol provided a great platform to share all of the manifestos and encourage discussion. A cross between a blog and wiki, Knol was very easy to set up and use.
Join the conversation, contribute your insights - what do manifestos reveal about the nature of software product development?
What do you KNOL about Software Manifestos? Contribute your perspective http://bit.ly/bepUOT
I will return to develop a taxonomy to further the discussion of the manifestos.
Monday, April 19, 2010
What is XAuth?
Check out this SlideShare Presentation:
Note: the acronymns should be capitalized as follows: XAuth, OAuth, OpenID
Note: the acronymns should be capitalized as follows: XAuth, OAuth, OpenID
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