How to make friends and influence your roadmap.
Or 'How to turn a Hack Day into something commercial'
Anyone who has worked in an IT company or has been a developer will have been involved in a 'Hack Day' at one time or another. For the uninitiated, these are events that involve the 'techies' and usually involve them spending the day 'off project' working on some kind of tool that will help them develop more easily.
Now, before I get loads of comments from you lovely development people, I'm certainly not trying to belittle the work you do on these days as I know the results can be valuable to you and in turn, to us Product Managers.
So, as a Product Manager, I'm going to be far more interested in a Hack Day if I can get involved and come out of it with something properly useful to me. During normal projects, I never get chance to mess around with new ideas as all of my projects have to be done to deliver a commercial product on a tight budget and carefully considered commercial requirements.
What I'd really like to do is get hold of the developers for a day and spend some time trying those things I normally never get chance to explore.
Now, how do I get these people away from their projects to do something different?
The answer is in 3 parts:
1. Use friends in high places
2. Bribery
3. Free Beer and Pizza (in essence, bribery again)
Once of the areas of data fascinating me right now is what's being done to open up public sector and other data to the people. Just take a look at www.data.gov.uk and similar sites for some examples! I'd love to be able to do something with all of this stuff but I personally don't have the skills and I certainly don't have the budget to make products out of this 'free' data.
Recently, I spoke to my MD and the heads of our development organisation about my idea. It's quite simple, run a Hack Day but give it a theme and try and get something commercial out of it that we could actually sell.
So, we came up with 'Product Sprint' to create a product concept and get a demo up and running in the space of one day. The theme: Open Data and Open Source. I'd get some teams of developers together and give each one a commercial stakeholder: a Product Manager or similar.
After working out some rough costs and getting approval, the plan was in place. We would spend one day creating a concept with the end being a Dragons' Den style event to choose a winner. That team would receive a nice prize and the concept would go onto my roadmap. I was pleasantly surprised by the reaction of the management team to my crazy idea. Explaining the benefits was key. These were:
1. Explore new sources of data.
2. Create a product with zero ongoing royalties or license fees for the data (therefore better margin).
3. Promote our teams to the rest of the organisation.
4. Team building and shared learning.
5. Potential for new ideas and new ways of working.
Leading up to the day I worked with stakeholders to put together the teams, get the resources I needed and explain the aims. It did take some encouragement in a few cases but once I'd got people to understand how useful open source could be to us, the response was great.
Now onto the bribery part.. If you want people to do something for free, it helps if you give them something back. I provided the four teams I had on the day with breakfast, lunch, snacks, beers and free t-shirts. The experience day prize also helped. So what did I get from the day?
To start off, an early start was required. Tea and bacon sandwiches dealt with that.
Next up, each team was given their own meeting room to work in (including laptops) and importantly the Product Manager was sitting in there too. I felt that this was really important to aid the team building, get the ideas right and stick to the task in hand.
Wandering round the teams during the day I was really pleased with how everyone traded ideas, put them on the white board and helped out with the presentation that the Product Manager had to prepare for the Den.
We ended the day by presenting all of the ideas and discussing the sources of Open Data or APIs, how we could sell the products and some of the likely questions that the Dragons' would ask. After some beers and pool, we all got early nights to prepare for what was to come next: The Den!
This took place at a company technical meeting with 150 people looking on. The teams were obviously nervous but again, it was amazing to see how the rest of the business had got on board. We had 4 senior management team members as our Dragons and the team managing the company event were fantastic and put together a full audio/visual tour-de-force to set the scene.
After the presentations and some great questions, everyone watching was really impressed with the quality of the concepts (any of which could be sold) and the winning idea is now on my roadmap for next year.
At the end of the event I bumped into my MD who asked me when the next 'Product Sprint' was planned for. Not a bad result at all!
I think in conclusion there are a few key things to do if you want to influence a future Hack Day and turn it into a Product Sprint.
1. Come up with a theme or a reason that fits the aims of your business.
2. Get the commercial and technical leaders on side before you launch.
3. Set a budget with a reason for the incentives and prizes.
4. Beg steal or borrow resources from the business.
5. Convince the rest of your Product Managers to help out. Anyone commercial can get involved, you just need to guide them through on the day.
6. Keep it casual and fun.
7. Commit to having the winner on your roadmap!
Contact me for more on this or check out tweets from the day using the tag #QASSprint.
We had a ball and I think it uncovered some fantastic opportunities to do things in a much more agile and 'Open' way.
Anyone who has worked in an IT company or has been a developer will have been involved in a 'Hack Day' at one time or another. For the uninitiated, these are events that involve the 'techies' and usually involve them spending the day 'off project' working on some kind of tool that will help them develop more easily.
Now, before I get loads of comments from you lovely development people, I'm certainly not trying to belittle the work you do on these days as I know the results can be valuable to you and in turn, to us Product Managers.
So, as a Product Manager, I'm going to be far more interested in a Hack Day if I can get involved and come out of it with something properly useful to me. During normal projects, I never get chance to mess around with new ideas as all of my projects have to be done to deliver a commercial product on a tight budget and carefully considered commercial requirements.
What I'd really like to do is get hold of the developers for a day and spend some time trying those things I normally never get chance to explore.
Now, how do I get these people away from their projects to do something different?
The answer is in 3 parts:
1. Use friends in high places
2. Bribery
3. Free Beer and Pizza (in essence, bribery again)
Once of the areas of data fascinating me right now is what's being done to open up public sector and other data to the people. Just take a look at www.data.gov.uk and similar sites for some examples! I'd love to be able to do something with all of this stuff but I personally don't have the skills and I certainly don't have the budget to make products out of this 'free' data.
Recently, I spoke to my MD and the heads of our development organisation about my idea. It's quite simple, run a Hack Day but give it a theme and try and get something commercial out of it that we could actually sell.
So, we came up with 'Product Sprint' to create a product concept and get a demo up and running in the space of one day. The theme: Open Data and Open Source. I'd get some teams of developers together and give each one a commercial stakeholder: a Product Manager or similar.
After working out some rough costs and getting approval, the plan was in place. We would spend one day creating a concept with the end being a Dragons' Den style event to choose a winner. That team would receive a nice prize and the concept would go onto my roadmap. I was pleasantly surprised by the reaction of the management team to my crazy idea. Explaining the benefits was key. These were:
1. Explore new sources of data.
2. Create a product with zero ongoing royalties or license fees for the data (therefore better margin).
3. Promote our teams to the rest of the organisation.
4. Team building and shared learning.
5. Potential for new ideas and new ways of working.
Leading up to the day I worked with stakeholders to put together the teams, get the resources I needed and explain the aims. It did take some encouragement in a few cases but once I'd got people to understand how useful open source could be to us, the response was great.
Now onto the bribery part.. If you want people to do something for free, it helps if you give them something back. I provided the four teams I had on the day with breakfast, lunch, snacks, beers and free t-shirts. The experience day prize also helped. So what did I get from the day?
To start off, an early start was required. Tea and bacon sandwiches dealt with that.
Next up, each team was given their own meeting room to work in (including laptops) and importantly the Product Manager was sitting in there too. I felt that this was really important to aid the team building, get the ideas right and stick to the task in hand.
Wandering round the teams during the day I was really pleased with how everyone traded ideas, put them on the white board and helped out with the presentation that the Product Manager had to prepare for the Den.
We ended the day by presenting all of the ideas and discussing the sources of Open Data or APIs, how we could sell the products and some of the likely questions that the Dragons' would ask. After some beers and pool, we all got early nights to prepare for what was to come next: The Den!
This took place at a company technical meeting with 150 people looking on. The teams were obviously nervous but again, it was amazing to see how the rest of the business had got on board. We had 4 senior management team members as our Dragons and the team managing the company event were fantastic and put together a full audio/visual tour-de-force to set the scene.
After the presentations and some great questions, everyone watching was really impressed with the quality of the concepts (any of which could be sold) and the winning idea is now on my roadmap for next year.
At the end of the event I bumped into my MD who asked me when the next 'Product Sprint' was planned for. Not a bad result at all!
I think in conclusion there are a few key things to do if you want to influence a future Hack Day and turn it into a Product Sprint.
1. Come up with a theme or a reason that fits the aims of your business.
2. Get the commercial and technical leaders on side before you launch.
3. Set a budget with a reason for the incentives and prizes.
4. Beg steal or borrow resources from the business.
5. Convince the rest of your Product Managers to help out. Anyone commercial can get involved, you just need to guide them through on the day.
6. Keep it casual and fun.
7. Commit to having the winner on your roadmap!
Contact me for more on this or check out tweets from the day using the tag #QASSprint.
We had a ball and I think it uncovered some fantastic opportunities to do things in a much more agile and 'Open' way.
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