Browsing Tag

scrum

2011 In Review: Top Posts and Alike

2011 was a fantastic year for me on many levels and Spatially Relevant has been around officially for 4.5 years, so thanks to all who have been around here the past year and more.  This is technically the 5th year in review since the blog started in 2007.  So every year I try to spend time looking at posts which folks liked and those which I liked which may have not been part of the top posts with reader engagement.  So here they are:

Top 10 Posts of 2011

These posts are the posts which had the most views, comments and alike from y’all here.

  1. Roadmap Audit: This post is an audit of publicly available roadmaps which I could find online to identify common trends in the software space.
  2. Scrum and Marketing: Having implemented Scrum in development and marketing this post contains a solid presentation on using agile methods for marketing.
  3. Innovation, Change and Adoption in Markets: The Netflix moment, before the Quickster issue.  It also covers the 9X effect in category or product adoption with Google + as well.
  4. Innovation Myths: Presentation on Innovation.
  5. Key Technology Trends: Cisco overview on key trends driving changes for individuals and businesses alike.
  6. Mobile Technologies, Trends and Adoption:  I’ve been tracking mobile issues for several years and this is one of the continued pieces on adoption of mobile.
  7. SCRUM and Kanban: An overview for developing products, specifically social games leverage Agile methods/approaches.
  8. Product Quality: Deming’s approach to quality as it relates to process and sourcing for building products.
  9. Social Media, Opportunity Costs, ROI and Decision Making: Social media isn’t free and when looking at social media you need to understand the trade offs and investment required.
  10. Career Planning in Tech Marketing:  This is my presentation from PCamp ATL on looking at Product Management and Marketing career planning.

My Favorite Posts from 2011

These are the 5 articles which I personally liked and you might not have seen here at Spatially Relevant.

  1. The Marketing is in the Middle Series:  This is an interview series of marketing and product folks and the main link is actually a summary of all participants over the years.  2011 featured folks from various industries like Jay Baer, Elizabeth Quintanilla, Joshua Duncan, Jennifer Doctor, Christopher Cummings, John Peltier, Marty Thompson and others.
  2. Pricing Options Matter:  This is a piece which was inspired by a conversation with Steve Johnson on Angry Birds and their pricing approach.
  3. The White Coke Can:  This is a piece which looks at branding in context of not just the stories we tell as marketers, but how our customers perceive our products and the experiences they have.
  4. The Map of Marketing and Product Management in the US:  This is a fun little map I created from the location of product managers and marketers in the US.
  5. The Definition of Product Management:  This is a presentation I did and posted on slideshare which is a curated discussion of what is product management in a single word.

Many thank to the folks who helped make 2011 another good year for Spatially Relevant.  Happy new year and be safe, cheers!

~jon

SCRUM In Marketing: Leveraging Agile Outside Development

When going Agile in development there are definitely challenges both inside and outside the traditional R&D group. The impact of improved velocity in the “manufacturing process” can definitely create bottlenecks in adjacent organizations/process owners.  Some organizations answer these challenges with going towards an Agile enterprise approach.  Others when asked “how can you use Agile methodologies outside of a traditional IT and Development mode?”  may roll out to another group here and there, but don’t go all-in.

Having had the opportunity to deploy Agile across the enterprise over the last several years – I’ll agree it helps bunches.  Focus, transparency and priority setting.    I’m definitely a believer in the benefits, which is why I’m sharing the presentation below.

Here is Kristen Petra’s pitch on how Hub Spot uses SCRUM in Marketing successfully from the 2011 Austin Product Camp/#PCATX.   While I think a Scrum Master role is needed, this is a solid overall intro into on how to use SCRUM outside of IT/development.

Epic: Context Based 1 Click

Title: Kid Stop 1 Click Content
Item: E-10103
Project: Winter 2010.Unbox
Goal: Increased Profitability
Points: 17
Source: Customer Service – Finance
Description:

Parents often enable children to watch Amazon Unbox unsupervised, after all TV’s are the best babysitter, but they cannot view their videos in their Unbox account without an open session which allows for 1 click purchasing.  While the purchaser does “own” and piece of viewed content, let’s say Ice Age 2: The Meltdown, they still request a refund either online, request a credit from the card processor and impact the quality of service for other customers and increase transactional costs.

Parents and other users would like a way to manage 1 click via the individual logon or a profile setting for what areas of amazon can have 1 click enabled. Should be a global setting which could be overridden on a given session.