by Enfocus Solutions | Apr 1, 2014 | Collaboration, Product Development, Uncategorized |
For Part 1: Easy to Talk About, Much Harder to Achieve, read previous blog post The question of when teams need to collaborate in the product development lifecycle has an easy answer: always. But, there are key activities that take place within a product development lifecycle where collaboration is absolutely necessary. Collaboration through Product Discovery and Product Delivery There is an emerging concept in product management called dual-track agile that essentially looks at product development as two tracks: the product discovery track, and the product delivery track. On the product discovery track, teams collaborate to understand what the right product is to build. On the product delivery track, teams collaborate to make sure the product is built right. (Source: Jeff Patton, www.agileproductdesign.com) Both tracks require a foundation of collaboration and validation in order to be successful. In today’s blog post we’re going to talk about the importance of collaboration through the product discovery phase of product development—when teams are trying to figure out ‘what’ actually needs to be built in order to be of value to the market. Traditionally, in the product development lifecycle the validation of a product doesn’t tend to happen until after the launch of a product or during the validation of a developed prototype. Usually by that time, a significant amount time and money has already been spent on defining and developing the product to some degree—without completely validating that the product will meet a market need. On the product discovery track of the dual track agile approach, the focus is on validation, validation, and validation. Validation that the right problem has been identified, validation that...
by Enfocus Solutions | Mar 12, 2014 | Business Analysis, Product Development, Uncategorized |
I was recently reading an article about a company featured in Fast Company magazine, who has become very successful with a very simple business model: give customers only what they want. You might be thinking: “well, that’s what every company does.” But, the 2013 Chaos Manifesto published by The Standish Group presents a very different story. They report that only 20% of any given product’s features are used often, 50% are hardly ever used, and the remaining 30% are used infrequently. Yikes. That literally means that about 70% of the functionality most companies are spending their money to discover and deliver to the market are not really even being used—and by extension, one can assume, needed. As a consumer I know I can relate to that—I’m pretty sure my phone does much more than I ever use, know how to use, or care to use. You can probably relate. But this company I was reading about in Fast Company, they didn’t really seem to have that issue because either a) they did not build anything not explicitly asked for by the market, or b) they quickly tossed any products that were not being used and moved onto research what else to develop. Now maybe that in and of itself is not that interesting, but what I did find interesting was they approach they used to do it. And how easily they seemed to have done it—as well as how cheaply. Some organizations spend thousands of dollars a year on market-sensing activities trying to figure out what the right product and features are to build—focus groups, surveys, market research service...
