Managing Experimentation

At Macadamian we are very good at managing expectations. While the expectations in the context of this project are very clear from a deliverable stand point, they are not so clear from a project management stand point.

Well... they are clear in a way since we do not treat that project any differently than any customer projects but since this project is internal it carries some "attributes" we do not always have the freedom to play with... for example:

Innovation & Creativity

We are not always sought for our innovations abilities. Sad reality. This is not the case here, let's innovate and be creative!

Experimentation

For obvious reasons, a service company continuously works at mitigating risks. In this case we allow ourselves some freedom and expect experimentation to take place.

Agilefullness

While most projects we work on are leveraging one form or another of the Agile methodologies (to varying extent) this project is fully agile - at least for the iPhone flavor in which I am participating. As a matter of fact, I am only taking part to the scrums and the team has been beautifully self managing itself. Kudos to you guys!

In retrospective, these are common themes in a product company. A product company must innovate and be creative, it is doing so via experimentation and it expects its people to take ownership and highly collaborate.

The message from me at this point from a product management stand point is this: get your team engaged in the project give them ownership and empower them to take the right decision. Doing so you might very well be giving them the ingredients required for success.

Next week I intend to provide some progression metrics.

Stay tuned!