Here at Jama we take a pretty open approach to the development of Contour, our collaborative requirements management / project management software and incorporate customer feedback, input from our advisors as well as research and planning we perform internally. We often invite smart people to have lunch with us to give us feedback on our vision for Contour and insight into what would be the perfect tool to help them. We trade sandwiches for market insights.
Yesterday, Lori Schmall, COO of Grist joined us. Grist is a Seattle based on-line media company focused on the environment. Time magazine recently named Grist the top green web site.
While we like to think and act green as a company – she was quick to point out a few plastic water bottles scattered around the conference room - I think we’ve got some work to do. Lori’s past life was in senior management at a Fortune 500 technology firm dealing with scenarios that are near and dear to our heart – enterprise product development and project management.
We focused first on our sales presentation. We’re constantly refining it to better speak to the value of our product, keep the flow engaging and eliminate the bullet points (we believe in a bullet point free world). This reminded me I need to revisit http://www.presentationzen.com/.
Our takeaways from this discussion:
- Get the audience involved as quickly as possible. This helps keep everyone focused and involved in the presentation
- Use stories to illustrate points, it’s much more interesting for everyone
- A little humor never hurts, we all can relate to funny scenarios that we live through
We then turned to the pain of project management. Lori offered up a nice, simplified definition of requirements management: “Delivering what the customer wants”. This speaks to the broader set of functionality that’s available within Contour.
For Lori, the #1 one pain point is when the team loses sight of what’s important to the customer. On long, complex projects when things change, it’s easy to get disconnected from what the stakeholders are expecting. She gave a great metaphor. It’s like an iceberg – the customer defines what they want, but it’s just the visible tip of the iceberg. The development team then has to create and manage through the supporting structure underneath the surface – the mammoth, complicated task of defining use cases, tasks, coding, testing, documenting, deploying to get to the end result of what the customer wants.
The key themes were:
- Visibility into the project – understanding what the status is at all times and who’s doing what
- Alignment – keeping everyone on the same page.
Continuing the metaphor, these strategy sessions with outside executives help us come up for air once and awhile, and keep us focused on the big picture of the value we deliver to customers. Thanks Lori for your time.