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customer value

Value – Revisited

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Value – Revisited

In the Agile Product space there are a few figures who are leading the way.

Jeff Patton – leads the way from an innovation and creativity perspective. Jeff’s storymapping technique is being used nearly everywhere to gain additional perspectives of backlogs beyond a simple list of requirements.

Ellen Gottesdiener – leads the way from a traditional requirements mapping perspective. Ellen has a strong Business Analysis background. As agile matured, she joined that approach and has added much in the way of mapping traditional analysis to agile analysis.

David Hussman – has partnered with Jeff Patton on many an occasion in his storymapping workshops. David has the uncanny ability to “see beyond” our current approaches and to keep us ground in “what matters”, while reminding us to ever challenge our staid approaches.

Roman Pichler – leads the way from a Product Ownership perspective. He focuses on valuation, forecasting, and roadmapping. I’ve always felt that my product ownership book focuses more towards the tactical role and Roman’s on the strategic. It doesn’t that that he’s a prolific contributor to the space.

And finally, Marty Cohen – leads the way helping us understand the nuance of Product Management as it related to agile products and Scrum Product Ownership. This is often an underexplored area in agile and Marty brings deep experience in Product Management, with an “agile slant”.

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The Agile Project Manager—Driving Value or Where’s the Beef?

The Agile Project Manager—Driving Value or Where’s the Beef?

There was a wonderful commercial I remember from years ago where a matronly woman named Clara Peller judged hamburgers by the amount of beef she found in them. Quite often, when she was disappointed in her quest, she would shout “Where’s the Beef?” in frustration. Wendy’s was the chain who came up with the advertising idea and to this day the line has become a catch-phrase for value delivery and customer expectations.

I guess Clara was onto something though. In my experience, business’ often miss the beef when they’re trying to deliver value to their customers—particularly in the software product arena. I don’t know why that is exactly. Sometimes I think the developers are too abstracted from their customers. They can rarely touch or observe them. Or understand their true challenges. So they’re guessing when it comes to needs—sort of throwing the software “over the wall” for feedback.