Summary of Todd Olson's Presentation


August 2012 Meeting Guest:  Todd Olson, VP Products, Rally Software Development

 

Todd is responsible for Product Management (incl. marketing, product development, etc.)  One of his roles is to be the manager of the Product Owners.  He is heavily involved in their Agile development process.

 

Some of the Key Points from his presentation include:

 

 

There are three levels of alignment:

  1. Executive level:  Themes, Initiatives, Programs.  3-6 months time frame.
  2. Features, Minimum Marketable Feature*, Project.  4-6 weeks.
  3. Stories, PBI's, WorkItems.  1 week.

* What is the minimum necessary to show this feature to a user and have them see its value?

 

Workflow statuses:

  1. Themes: Define, Business Case, Balancing, Approval, In-Progress, Enablement
  2. Features:  Idea, Analysis, Ready to Pull, In Dev, Ready to Release, Released, Communicated
  3. Stories:  Backlog, Ready to Pull, In Progress, Accepted, Released