Life is moving faster for many of us, more demands are being placed on our time and attention, both personally (being a father, husband, friend, family) and professionally, (work, networking, learning) I’ve found myself paying more attention to ways to be more productive and to work on the right things at the right times.

Working as part of remote teams (does anyone work exclusively with people that are right next to them anymore?) these coordination and communication sessions are invaluable. We rely on each other more and more to handle complex tasks before, after or simultaneously with our efforts… how do we keep things moving slowly with a minimum of delays and inefficiencies?

A simple timer can kickstart tough work

I wanted to share a few resources I’ve found valuable.

Here’s a great article called “Doing the board” which is really close to the quick “daily scrums” I’ve been doing with some of the teams I work with. For those of you who know about Agile development, our scrums are a less technical version but still answer the basic 3 questions: “What did you do yesterday? What are you doing today? and What roadblocks do you have?” Here are some resources to explore these concepts: Mountain Goat Software, Scrum Basics website, a blog post on some additional best practices in holding the meeting.

A good article on Lifehacker, (one of my favorite daily reads) “I procrastinate because I care“, which explains a lot about perfectionists and their productivity… the concept is pretty clear in the title. The article also talks about the “Pomodoro Technique“, a timer-based way to kickstart large, complex or intimidating efforts. The concept is “I can do anything for 15 min or so” and you set a simple timer to start, knowing that an end is coming… you won’t be swamped forever in the complexity. A little more info here.

How do you and your team track personal and team tasks?

Web Worker Daily offers some good advice on building and keeping trust when you don’t work physically next to your coworkers or clients. Check out the article here.

I’ve been working with clients, partners and teammates remotely for years, and I’ve found that a focus on high-touch communication and relationship building is also a key to productive interactions.

My last core project team was spread across 3 countries in Europe, 5+ cities in at least 4 states in the U.S. We used Agile/Scrum development and had daily touchbases, but some of the most productive time was the occasionaly in-person relationship building we did while traveling to their workplace or mine. We built an understanding of each of us as people and how we communicate, or values and motivations. We were also constantly chatting, short messaging and had frequent informal communications that brought and kept us working together efficiently and enjoyably. I’m happy to say that I still stay in touch with many of the team and count them as great friends. How many of your old project teams can say that?
What have you learned when working with remote teams? What do you NOT do?

The second ever ProductCamp started in Austin at 8am this morning. I had never been to any BarCamp-style “un-conference” before, but I must say I really enjoyed it. It was active, informative and agile, in the sense that we the participants, voted on the sessions at the beginning of the day, we were expected to actively discuss, interupt and add our own value to the proceedings. Open sessions were guided and moderated, some a bit more successfully than others, but all that I attended had value to me as a marketer and professional. They had a Twitter account open and many of us Twittered about it, and posted photos to Flickr in this group. My Twitter here at CharlieNB.

I enjoyed a session on general Agile/Scrum and roles, another on Agile best practices and horror stories with Ross Hobbie. I was interested in others managing content and/or marketing via Scrum processes, but no others were. After the session though, I spoke with several people that had great product marketing teams and development teams, but no user-centered design or UX resources. They were interested in how UX could help with their prototyping and products, several good discussions!

The Global Product Mgmt session was a little too open and unfocused, but to be fair, it’s a REALLY broad and complex topic, it could have been broken into 3-4 different sessions.

I jumped into UX 101 with Ben Phenix late, but it was well recieved by all, clear, simple concepts that were easy to apply. I’ve been through and given a lot of UX presos, and this one was good.

Pat Scherer gave more of a presentation rather than a discussion, but her detailed points on Priorities and Roadmaps was very complete and clearly well proven in the real world.

Next up was a Product Management Tools roundtable… very well moderated by (I think) Cindy Phillips. We covered a lot, from requirements gathering, to basic excel templates, into productivity tools. Here are the ones I captured: Blackblot, xcelsius, devonthink, xmind, “montecarlo analysis” excel plug-ins, Mindmap, MindMeister, Google Trends, search volume, surveys with Survey Monkey and QuestionPro, customer wiki’s and communities, Salesforce QA (? not sure of the name), Markettools, Passenger, PHPBB communities, BasecampHQ, fogbugs (tracks accuracy of estimates), Jira, JOTT, Rally, Webex, Breeze, Camtasia, Snagit, Yugma, Netmeeting, Lifehacker. Whew!!!

My last session was with Charlie Ray on navigating political minefields. Charlie was very entertaining, and also shared many good insights… management styles aside, there was a lot of good info to bring to daily life. My favorite quote is “Nip the G.M.O.O.T” meaning stop CEO’s from saying “Get Me One Of Those” when seeing features and adding them willy-nilly to products. Charlie also won the award for best session at the end of the day. Good job Charlie!!!

Throughout several of the sessions, the differences between startups with scarce time, personnel and financial resources versus larger, mature companies with sometimes too many resources and plenty of budget were apparent. Some of us discussed the idea of a StartupCamp, either a seperate BarCamp, or as a track at the next Product or BarCamp. We’ll be gathering thoughts and discuss further, so contact me if you are interested.

I really want to thank the organizers of the event, Paul Young and John Milburn, they did a great job.

Sponsors took care of the space, coffee/snacks, lunch, tshirts and mugs, thanks!

I certainly recommend the BarCamp concept and certainly will participate in the next Product or any other Camp. (Full world wide list here.)

Hope to see you at the next BarCamp event!

[tag]ProductCamp, BarCamp, UX, product management, product marketing, Austin, agile, global products, StartupCamp[/tag]

I’m looking forward to attending/participating in the upcoming ProductCamp Austin on 14 June, organized by Paul Young.

ProductCamp is a collaborative unconference about Product Marketing and Management

In the spirit of BarCamp, ProductCamp is a collaborative, user organized unconference, focused on Product Marketing and Management topics. At ProductCamp there are no “attendees,” since everyone participates in some manner: presenting, leading a roundtable discussion, helping with logistics, securing sponsorship, setting up wifi, or volunteering. ProductCamp is a great opportunity for you to learn from, teach to, and network with professionals involved in the Product Management, Marketing, and Development process from the Austin area!

In my new (contract) role, I’m responsible for both general marketing and our product as well… a social and video sharing community website. It’s very early stage, built on top of a purchased platform with basic/generic functionality. The big task we are facing is how to develop the product, the design and the content… preparing to attract the community.

I’ve had less than a year experience with Agile – Scrum processes, but I’m pretty excited about it’s potential, especially with user experience/ UX and site development/ management. I’ll go into an overview of how we are managing this site/product/community via our own version of Agile/ Scrum on this blog soon. But for now, I hope to learn a lot and fine tune our process/ priorities at ProductCamp Austin.

By the way, Paul also has a great blog I’ve just discovered, Product Beautiful. It’s focused on (what else?) product management and marketing.
I’ll be there, hope to see you!

[tag]ProductCampAustin, product management, agile, scrum UX, Barcamp [/tag]

The US Census Bureau is getting ready to conduct the 2010 Census, the population count that will be used to calculate congressional districts and funding. The trouble is, they have usability problems with the handheld computers they were planning to use, in addition to the organizational communication issues you may expect from a government agency that does the bulk of it´s work once every 10 years. Here´s the story.

Evidently, they built and are doing at least some testing of the systems, but it sounds like they fell into the classic “waterfall” development trap: build it out, then test it.

Big worries for the nation’s first high-tech census should have been obvious when tests showed some of the door-to-door headcounters couldn’t figure out their fancy new handheld computers.

Agile User Experience Design (Agile UX) would likely have prevented this problem by introducing low-detail (paper-prototype) testing earlier in the development process. By testing with paper prototypes and even more functional prototypes on computers much earlier in the development process, the problems with the interface and system logic could have been found, and new solutions created that worked better BEFORE the systems were written and constructed. As it is, the budget may QUADRUPLE for this project… not anything I´d like on my resume!

Of course the CEO of the company that built the devices offers this excuse:

“After you spend about 30 minutes to an hour familiarizing yourself with it, it’s as easy to use as a modern cell phone,” Raimondi said.

As “easy as a modern cell phone”? You´ve got to be kidding me… modern cell phones, with some notable exceptions, (iPhone and a few others) are a total confusing mess of features and functions. Most tech-savvy people take days of focused use to master some of the interactions and complexity. They can probably make a phone call, but I´d hardly call modern cell phones “easy to use” in general. You can take the massive migration to the iPhone as some small proof of that.

Besides the obvious error in logic above, the CEO also ignores the demographic and usage scenarios of the users… Census takers are likely not to be super-tech saavy computer enthusiasts, and they may not have days to train or get familiar with the systems.

I´m not belittling how tough the problem of designing this system is, but their process and understanding of how to design systems could use some modernization… I think they should try going back to pencil and paper themselves…