The stars to road innovation framework wouldn’t be complete without the concept of stories. The story decides the fate of the innovation. It can prove to be very powerful.
Powerful Stories
Author Archives: markus
Meet with users to create great products
Even though – as a UX professional – I must stress the importance of meeting users, I have to admit that the title of this article is not exactly accurate and just meeting users is not really the point. Having revealed this, I should probably explain what really matters when meeting users and give some indication on how to do it. This article covers two stars to road essentials: the UCD cycle and the UX levels.
Lets start at the beginning and lets review a first big challenge creators of great products are facing:
Continue readingBill & Chuck – and how they fight ideas into the market
Let me introduce two characters, Bill and Chuck. To be honest, they are personae distilled from people you could meet. They are especially interesting because of their behavior: Instead of collaborating to let ideas compete they fight to get their ideas into the market. And sadly, they have good reasons to do so.
Lets collaborate with our partners!
At the recent Agile Unconference in Zürich I came across the concept of lean agile procurement. The key insight for me was: forget preparing RFPs, rather establish a good relationship with a select list of partners.
The big thing about SAFe
If you never have had a look at the scaled agile framework, you may want to do so. It’s has some really good concepts in it. Still with all the enthusiasm I feel like being drawn back to the good old times of software engineering. And you know why?
Five or one guidelines for the minimal viable product
In our current project, we use an approach of the minimal viable product and we steer it with the story mapping technique. From the discussions in our team, here are five guidelines (or just one?) for such an endeavor to ensure a better work-life-balance.
User experience flow from stars to road
Companies, not surprisingly, want to make business. New products are not created just for fun but they should contribute to this overall plan. For that, a performing team combining a couple fields of expertise is an excellent asset. Each of these experts brings in their respective methodology. The article agile innovation from stars to road outlines a basic collaborative structure. This article is about one aspect: the users’ experiences.
User story shopping – a sports event management system
The challenge awaits our project: How to deal with the many expectations from our customers that are far beyond the project budget? The answer in my current project – the sports event management system – is based on user story mapping.
grok – negotiate – build up
In our current project, a software for managing sports events, user stories play an important role when it comes to development. Interestingly the focus of the requirements conversation changed completely from one level of maturity to the next. And there is a pattern behind it, as it seems. It leads to user story mapping.
A case for features – a sports event management system
Currently, I’m involved in a project to develop an event management system for large sports events. The goal is to replace a few existing systems with one integrated system that is able to cater for the coming needs. End of elaboration is closing in and we’re planning for the incremental delivery to follow during construction. Budgeting, estimation and release planning all turn around features (Part 2).
User centred business analysis – a sports event management system
Currently, I’m involved in a project to develop an event management system for large sports events. The goal is to replace a few existing systems with one integrated system that is able to cater for the coming needs. The project will last for about five years. The project team will grow to approximately 20 persons. We apply an agile unified process.
Part 1: Understanding business is a success factor. We use methods from user centred design rather than from business modeling.
Continue readingFrom Stars to Road agile innovation toolbox
Given that stars to road has grown quite a bit it is time to give a quick overview over the toolbox we described so far (or wanted to but did not yet). This list is meant to grow, once we add more tools into the toolbox.
Prioritizing Backlog Items
Agile practice recommends to focus on business value. Those items with the highest business value should be implemented first. At the goto zürich conference held in April 2013, one recurring topic was how to prioritize backlog items.
Continue readingWhy Joey taped a picture of a cake to his wall
If you ever tried to propose an idea to somebody, you have certainly experienced a few personalities, like Joey has in this story. And after having met them Joey, for example, felt the urge to pin a picture of a cake in a sunset to his cubicle walls. For others, this is not sufficient and they have to create a lengthy comic strip.
Killing or curing – experience the future
Have you seen the keynote of Stephan Frickas at the RE ’12 in Chicago? His team created a simulated environment and let real users experience prototypes to figure out, if the requirements (and the design) fit. It’s killing or curing the user centred way!
Four skills of innovative companies
Innovative climate! Creativity methods! Excellent people! Agile! Leadership! Crowd innovation! Strategy! These is just some of the good advice found on the Internet on how to make a company more innovative. But there can be a bit more structure to such advice: four skills.
Know how to shape the future
In order to create great products, know how is needed. Interdisciplinary or cross-functional teams are the way to make people with different expertise create a common solution. Here’s a puzzle piece for cross-functional teams: 6 generic areas of expertise needed in a product development.
Maturity tools for product owners
Pin the maturity cards on the wall. Ask how well do we foresee the change we’re going to inflict with the planned features. “Customers will love it”, the engineer proclaims putting a few features on tree level. The sales rep sourly adds: “If they’ll ever grasp it”, moving them up into the clouds.
Increase productivity with a Speed Creation session
In large and distributed companies the knowledge is spread. Experts come from different locations and subsidiaries. These experts often work in several projects simultaneously. This leads to an efficiency loss and long product development cycles. What if there is a way to get rid of dozens bilateral and specialized division workshops and preparation meetings? The approach is called approach “Speed Creation”.
Continue readingAgile innovation from stars to road
Taking ideas from the stars as innovation onto the road can feel like being stomped by a herd of elephants. It’s people and trade-offs. Well, even while we’re quite a reasonable lot most of the day, we still do a few quite stupid things. Especially if interests, values, and opinions clash. Here’s an agile way to innovate.
