Archive for July, 2012

Live Notes – @jtwinsor @eurorscgny @victorsnspoils on Innovation

July 24, 2012

We had the great luck to have John Winsor speak at the How To Euro Thought Leadership Series about collaboration, innovation and Victors & Spoils.  Here are my live notes. 

Inspiration for Victors & Spoils was based on a conversation with Alex Bogusky about the fact that ideas can come from anywhere.

V&S has a “crowd in a digital database.”  But considers themselves an agency.

  • Identify
  • Collaborate
  • Create
  • Review
  • Client buys the work they use

Moving from Scarcity to Abundance.  Where “Abundance” is inspiration, collaboration, curation.

Ideo, Frog and advertising are going to come together.  We’re going to create products for companies via the digital medium.  Ideas that do.
Get out of the way.  Adv ertisers are looking for something different.  “Take fate into your own hands and reinvent advertising.”

Example of SmartWool, outdoor gear base layer. Had a huge social following.  Asked fans to strip down to SmartWool base layer and post on FB.

But can we work directly with fans? asked clients.  So VnS created “Fan Machine.”  Everyone can write briefs.  Fans can vote briefs up and down.

Results: 4 briefs, 1500 ideas, 50,000 votes – conducted for Harley-Davidson

Questions:

What do you do with confidentiality issues?  Won’t some of it give away competitive advantage?  Not as badly as traditional agency.  Ideas are floating in and out of the office.

What inspired him about David Jones was he wants to change, that Havas is going to be Future First.

He’s found Gareth Kay’s lots of Small Ideas work interesting, yet has not abandoned the Big Idea.

The reason YouTube filled with videos is everyone has a voice.

Thinks Agency Machine might help solve the perennial agency issue of “I’m-too-busy/I’m-too-idle” – talent allocations.

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Live Notes @andersramsay #scrumnyc #agile #eurorscgny 7/19 7 pm

July 19, 2012

Anders Ramsay speaking at the Scrum NYC User Group, using a beta version of his Agile 2013 workshop.

My comment: One of the major questions that has come up in training I have personally taken is devs saying the stories are not “detailed enough.” In this talk/workshop Anders presents a way to solve this issue — and make better software by considering UX — using varieties of user stories.

First, elicit Experience Stories that state the problem versus a solution. Experience Stories ask “what is the source problem or goal?” (This is often emotional, not easy estimable, testable, etc.)

Dev Stories answer “What we should build.”

Feature stories answer features we would like.

Not that stories are written three times, but evolve, and even UX has been considered.

Elicit Experience Stories > glue together with UX design

(Anders ran Innovation Game of Speedboat @lukehohmann )

Anders on personna:
– find four or five quirks
– use a person that is *not* an average Joe-Blow
– don’t use a picture, don’t spend time.
– not clinical, scientific, more utilitarian

Use Design Studio
– establish focus and boundaries
– warmup /raw materials
– sketching in a time box
– pitch / critique

Card storming write as many possible features down as possible.

Then based on cards, do story mapping.

UI then shows whats missing and enables effective sizing of stories. Story maps reveal features that should be in UI.

Customers do not know how to size cards. Work with dev to slice features into cards.

Putting “why” at the center gives us the “so that” of a user story.

Size of stories can be confusing. What’s our destination? If too big to decompose.

A vision story has a different purpose.

Level of detail needed is determined by person building it, and juxtaposed with cost.

Could “dot voting” skew? Story points not same. It is about trending in current moment. Story points attach costs.

Anders believes scrum puts too much weight on product owner. Jeff talking about this at Agile 2012. Product owners should be dictators inside a democracy. Democratize prioritization to extent you can. PO should not be writing stories.

Rob Purdie commented: Scrum has demanded PO involvement deeply. Depends on organizational maturity. Otherwise the PO swoops in at beginning / end.

Anders: no matter what PO says, it may not lead to product success. ( Via Lean Startup)

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