PITA 033

ICEBREAKER: ESL Story Dice Online

TOPIC 1 - Making change happen in super large orgs, top-down versus community led, and ideas for developing products in this space.

• Start small- try and join up good practices/approaches from a couple of the smaller regions/groups

• Federation vs Centralisation

• Create principles & standards with the community, coordinate loosely

• Create a small central group with reps from each community

• Don’t reinvent everything - who has done this well? Can you aim everyone at emulating that?

• Confront them with the anti-product and ask the groups to respond to that

• Is there a global architect? Can you build to encourage a good result?

TOPIC 2 - How to build team culture and engagement across lots of time zones?

• Optimise for async communication

• Delegate to the teams

• Ring-fence budget and time for regular team offsites and activities

• Culture-forming event - time-chained, where it keeps going in  a follow-the-sun model

• Maybe penpals? send care packages. Get people talking sync or async

TOPIC 3 - What are some good techniques for evaluating the competition when it comes to developing a new product?

• Understand the problem, from the customer perspective. Then understand what their current options are in the market,. Then positioning:  how will we solve this better than anyone else, on at least one axis? From https://outofowls.com/book

• It’s a part of  user research

• Build a simple framework to work in - i.e. a table with the criteria you want to compare and learn what others do well or badly, all from a user perspective - e.g. tone of voice, target audience, payment options, web vs mobile app, reviews and feedback online, offering specific features, etc.

• More on positioning: Obviously Awesome, by April Dunford

• Also look at your product neighbours, doesn’t have to be immediate and obvious competitors in your industry, look at companies and products that have conceptual similarities you can learn from

• Do usability testing oncompetitor’s products

TOPIC 4 - Dual-track agile, yes, but how?

• Dual Track Development is not Duel Track – Help your organization focus on successful outcomes (Jeff Patton)

• A 2x2 matrix, credit to Jeanette Fuccella:  https://twitter.com/johnrayknight/status/1458041301497257990

• Think of it as a balance, not a divide - where is the dial?

• Don’t do it - we’re cleaning up the mess from having separate people doing it with poor communication/collaboration

• Remember: research has a shelf life - it goes stale