AgileCamp Silicon Valley 2016

What do markets and customers really need? Most agile discussions focus on building things right; we'll focus on validation and avoiding 100% waste.

Presentation with lots of audience participation:
- process improvement versus market success
- urgency of customer/end user validation (early and often)
- real cost of development
- tools for reaching your real end users and buyers

In this highly interactive and experimental peer learning session, we present a nine temptations that Backlog Managers face. Ignoring each of these enticements is critical to overall backlog health. For those that do heed devilish advice will surely fall into the abyss of failure.

Bring a smartphone that supports SMS or internet connectivity and be ready to contribute to the dialog of why these common and less common tenets of backlog management are critical to product development success and what you can do about them.

A solid product strategy is an essential ingredient to shape your product vision, effectively allocate resources and prioritize the product backlog. Without a product strategy, you can only react to the market. This talk is targeted toward anyone looking to create durable differentiation for their products and carve out a defensible position in the market. We look at why product vision and customer research are not enough to succeed in competitive markets. The talk will use case studies from varied industries to explore how to read markets, analyze competitors, predict their next moves, and adapt our strategy to exploit hidden opportunities. In particularly, if your product is not the market share leader, this session is for you. You will learn a framework, steps, and techniques to create a killer product strategy to guide your backlog prioritization and establish yourself as a true product leader in your organization.

You will learn the five key elements to create a killer product strategy, including how to:
1. Connect your product strategy to your product vision and backlog prioritization
2. Map a market and your competition to identify hidden opportunities
3. Avoid missteps and navigate highly competitive markets
4. Flank stronger competition vs. attempting a head on assault
5. Apply the framework through multiple case studies

We will be covering the outline of the Design for Delight process including customer driven innovation, deep customer empathy, go broad to go narrow and rapid experiments with customers. We will also walk through an example of how we applied the D4D process to solve a key customer problem for our internal Agile program, i.e. eating our own dog food.
There are three equally sized sections; overview of D4D, exercise and example of D4D application.