Working in middle to large companies means working with several Scrum teams, different departments and having often far from ideal working communication processes. Product Management usually is only one piece of the greater picture and has to serve multiple stakeholders.
Keeping the core stakeholders informed about the latest releases and achievements mostly works. But it becomes really hard to keep the rest of the company up to date. That is an important issue especially if the core business model of the company consists of products driven by product management. Everyone in the company should know what latest functions and features the company brought to market and how these are working. But how?
When I joined my company there has been a bi-weekly company wide product review. Goal was to achieve exactly this same information level. But – to be short – it sucked. It was boring and hard to understand for the audience, it had little information value and also for the product teams it was more like an appointment to the dentist than a stage to show their great work. I was given the opportunity to change that process. And we are now on a really good track. Now we still have a company wide product demo showing all our colleagues what product management released and what it achieved. But we moved from bullet-point-slides to live demos, from complaints about technical set up and length of the meeting to discussions about metrics. We are now able to give teams a stage and deliver valuable information to our colleagues. In my talk I will line out where we started, what our main challenges have been and how we measured our progress on a regular basis and – step by step – came up with a satisfying format. We haven’t finished yet improving – but that’s not the goal. Because we want to continuous improve.
Video producer: http://ndcoslo.com/