This is not "pure" Scrum

Just some background. I've been doing traditional Product Mgmt and Marketing for some time now. Over the last few years I've transitioned to Agile Product Management and my posts here will mostly reflect my journey from traditional to Agile.

We are currently Scrumming, but not in its purest sense and keep hearing comments like "thats not pure Scrum".

Well from what I've seen Scrum is very contextual and a framework that leaves a lot of the details for the team to decide on how they want to do things. So there is nothing like pure Scrum.

And by the way saying that User Stories not written in the now famous Mike Cohn format of "As a type of user, I want some goal so that some reason" is not Scrum .. is ridiculous at best.
I respect Mike and his writing a lot, especially his "User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development" book that's kinda like a bible for Product Owners. However I do believe that some stories have to be contorted to meet this format and sometimes there is a lot of redundancy in this format as well. Imagine 40 stories starting with "As a Sales Rep ...". So well written user stories in any format (user stories, use cases etc) should do for Scrum. Tyner Blain has a wonderful blog posted on this that I would recommend to any team transitioning from WF to Agile.

I'd like to hear more from people who are doing "pure" Scrum .. have large product lines in the enterprise software space with legacy code, bug fixes and globally distributed teams.

3 .. 2 .. 1 We have liftoff

Hello and welcome to this blog. This is my attempt that sharing thoughts, having conversations and reflecting on all things that are product related.

3 LinkedIn Tell's to look out for

A tell in poker is a subtle but detectable change in a player's behavior or demeanor that gives clues to that player's assessment of his hand. A player gains an advantage if he observes and understands the meaning of another player's tell, particularly if the tell is unconscious and reliable

Off late I've detecting a number of tell's through LinkedIn so wanted to share my top three and see if others have noticed it and agree. Or am I reading too much into the LinkedIn body language.

#1 - LinkedIn profile updated to 100%.

#2 - Posting status updates that read like " ... looking for newer challenges ..."

#3 - Adding recruiter to network. Evaluate and appraise or departure from company usually occurs in a few weeks or months.

The Wonderful and Weird world of Twitter

Using Twitter is like "Alice in Wonderland", its wonderful and weird

Its a wonderful tool that can be private or public or both, corporate or personal or both, logical or illogical or both well hopefully you get the point.

So here are 5 reasons why I think its wonderful ... and weird

#1 - Wonderful cause I can keep in touch with my network and if I feel like shouting out "I need caffeine" on a Wed afternoon I can. Weird cause now I can see virtual colleagues shout out about things like "Gummy Bears".

#2 - Wonderful cause it allows me to communicate with friends and family quickly and easily at the same time. Did you know that you could "direct message" someone by putting "d username message". Weird that Twitter allows me to do the same thing I used to did with my IM status a few years ago and yet its so much more engaging and powerful.

#3 - Wonderful cause with Twitter I can open conversations with people in my industry or area without having to visit tradeshows or events or ever having to meet them in reality. Well you might say that no big deal cause more collaboration and networking tools allow that. Weird cause its a best response I've seen from complete strangers wanting to engage in a short 140char conversation.

#4 - Wonderful cause I can now get all my news from the likes of Guy Kawasaki, Chris Brogan et al. Weird cause it makes me wonder if they realize how much folks like me rely on them to feed me tidbits ;-)

#5 - Wonderful cause big media and spammers have still not figured out how to abuse Twitter (blatantly). Nothing weird about that, its cool.

... and all this is with very few Following and Followers.

I'm not sure if you need 1000's of followers or need to follow 1000's on Twitter to get value out of it. Though I can clearly see folks in sales and marketing doing that, especially those that might be companies of "1" or "they" are the brand.

If harnessed appropriately Twitter or micro-blogging tools like Twitter can be yet another amazing collaboration and productivity channel within an enterprise. Imagine mgr's using it to keeping in touch with their large distributed team's, Smaller teams leveraging it to stay tight, sales or project teams updating each other, salespeople using it to mine and harvest, marketing using it to drive messages and test the mood.

For me Twitter fills the gap between an IM and a Message Board or Email Group.

Speaking of email groups I wonder when Microsoft starts offering micro-blogging as part of Hotmail or Outlook + MSN Live or Sharepoint for internal use. I use them as an example cause they have the tools and web properties to make this happen. Imagine you could tweet through Hotmail or Outlook and create your network or look up tweets on MSN Live later.
Thunderbird could do that as well, except they don't have a web property like that to persist the network and content. The only other company that I can see doing this is Google with Gmail as the client and one of their properties. Wouldn't that be cool.

The only downside I see for that is that Twitter today supports umpteen clients and something like that from Microsoft or Google might not.

Ah the wonderful world of Twitter.

Predicting the "Savables" from your Profitable Customers

Read this interesting article "Predictive Analytics Can Pinpoint Profitable Customers" on DestinationCRM that is based on a Forrester report "Optimizing Customer Retention Programs" by Suresh Vittal. While I haven't read the report yet, this article really got me thinking.

In a slowing or contracting market new customers are hard to come by so the focus often turns to retaining existing customers. Of those existing ones the smart marketing guys soon narrow down to the profitable ones. Now this is where this new report makes it interesting. They further segment profitable customers into segments based on the likelihood of their response;

• "Savables": Receiving an offer won't induce these customers to leave, but not receiving one might. This is the group that marketers must focus on.  
• "Sleeping dogs": An unwelcome marketing campaign can provoke this group to end the relationship altogether.
• "Sure things": Customers who don't need to receive offers to stay.
• "Lost causes": Customers who will leave regardless of the offer.

Of these the Savables are the ones where marketers should focus their dollars and that segment can be further split into sub-segments or customers as well since not everyone is equally savable.

Now this is where it can get tricky predicting behavior cause how do you determine that a "Savable" is not a "Sleeping Dog". I'm assuming that macro-trends matching the consumers profile might be one determining criteria, however it might actually be more interesting for companies to analyze their own pipeline and sales order trends to determine how successful they've been in selling to or converting these "Savables" after a campaign. I'll try getting into the report to determine what Forrester thinks might be determining factors for each of these segments.

But will surely keep an eye out on more about the Uplift model as we market through the current economy.

Back from the break .. Its a new world

Havnt posted in a while and its not been that long really .. well maybe in blog terms its been eons (2months) and oh boy has the world changed in these two months. First we had the financial meltdown, marquee names like Lehman vanished, Barrack Obama was elected president, gas is back down to under $3 a gal, folks like you and me are wondering where all of this is going. Sure the world has changed from just 2 months ago.

Well a couple of things have changed on the professional front as well, after close to 10 years I've left the mother ship at Oracle/Siebel and ventured into a very exciting gig at a smaller but high growth, high potential company - NetSuite. Its a phenomenal place with very bright people and a very powerful product. In the new role I'm responsible for CRM product management at NetSuite.

There are a number of things already queued up that I want to blog about in the areas of CRM, NetSuite, Product Management, Scrum/Agile and personal experiences (like my really crappy experience buy a 3G iPhone).

So this blog is to get started from the break and start writing again.

What's under the Shiny Chrome?

Google's launched their latest we're not trying to go after MSFT product called "Chrome". Here's their description of the product ..

Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier.

Now that I've installed and used the product a little bit, here are 3 things on the top of my mind.

1. Its not compelling enough (yet) to make me switch from FF.
2. The current EULA will make it next to impossible for use in a compliant enterprise.
3. Does this mean web coders will now have yet another fork in their code saying "If Chrome .. do this ... else".

Update:
Haha .. I find it ironic that when I accessed my Hotmail account from Chrome I got this message.

We recommend that you upgrade your web browser so you can get the most out of Windows Live Hotmail. Upgrading should only take a few minutes. To get started, choose one of the browsers below:

• Microsoft Internet Explorer
• Mozilla Firefox
• Apple Safari

Not sure if its just a caching issue or what but it sure is ironic.