Christopher Evans

A great tool for discovering opportunities to remove features is the Eliminate-Reduce-Raise-Create grid. The grid, which forms part of the Blue Ocean Strategy, encourages you to identify the key features that are used to compete in the marketplace, be it by your own product or the competitors. You then determine which of those features your product can eliminate and which it should provide to a lesser extend or in an inferior way. But that’s not all. The grid also encourages you to identify new and improved features that set your product apart. This leads to a matrix with four quadrants that give the grid its name: Eliminate, Reduce, Raise, and Create.

Let’s take a look at an example and apply the grid to the first iPhone, which was launched in 2007.

As the picture above shows, the first iPhone eliminated a number of smartphone features that were considered a standard or must-have back in 2007. These included different models to choose from, a physical keyboard and a stylus to write on the screen. Additionally, it reduced a number of features such as the voice and the camera quality and the email integration (no POP and no Exchange support), which its competitors excelled in.

But the iPhone also provided enhanced and genuinely new features as shown in the “Raise” and “Create” quadrants above. These include mobile Internet in form of the Safari browser, integrating the iPod with a mobile phone, a brand-new eye-catching design, and a revolutionary touch screen. Removing and weakening features helped Apple reduce time-to-market, resulted in an uncluttered, easy to use product, and made the product stand out.

Before you decide which features you are going to remove or reduce, ensure that you have a solid understanding of your target group and the problem your product solves or the benefit it provides. You will also benefit from a good portion of courage. It’s always easier to create a me-too product than to do something different. But “innovation is not about saying yes to everything. It’s about saying no to all but the most crucial features,” as Steve Jobs once said.

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Learn More

You can learn more about successfully differentiating your product and using the Eliminate-Reduce-Raise-Create grid by attending my product strategy training course. Please contact me if you want me to deliver the workshop onsite or as an interactive webinar.

 

Theory and Practice

In theory, your product backlog should be prioritised with the high-priority items at the top and the low priority items at the bottom. The top items should be detailed and fine-grained. But as their priority decreases, they should become more and more coarse-grained. You could capture your top items as small user stories that are ready to be implemented in the next sprint. But further down in the backlog you would use epics, which are big sketchy stories. How detailed an items is therefore depends on its priority, as the following picture shows.

If your product backlog does not look like the one above, does this mean it is wrong?

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The Product Lifecycle

I find that a product backlog like the one pictured above is optimised for a young product. At this stage, you typically have to experiment with new ideas and change your product frequently, for instance, to discover the right user experience and features or to enhance and optimise them. As a consequence, you want to be able to easily change your backlog, keep it concise, and use only a small amount of detailed items. Otherwise, updates are too much effort and take too long.

But as your product stabilises and eventually matures, you have learned to better understand the market, the customer needs, and how to address them. This increases your ability to anticipate how your product is likely to evolve. Consequently, you can add more details to your backlog.

How detailed your product backlog should be is therefore tied to the lifecycle stage of your product: Young product should have a concise backlog with few details; older, stable products tend to benefit from a more detailed backlog, as the following picture shows.

The product backlog on the left-hand size of the lifecycle curve carries only a few detailed items; most of its contents are coarse-grained. But the backlog on the right-hand side is the opposite: It contains many more detailed items and fewer coarse-grained ones. As a consequence, it is larger and less concise. But watch out that your backlog does not grow in an uncontrolled fashion or morph into a wish list. Complement it with a product roadmap to capture the longer-term outlook of how your product is likely to grow.

While the product lifecycle is great to gauge the right level of detail, it is not enough. You should also consider where your product’s position in the release cycle.

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The Release Cycle

As you start working on a new product version or a major release – think of iOS 8.4 or Windows 10 – you typically encounter more unknowns and risks than towards the end of the project. If you address the risks on early, then your product backlog is particularly volatile in the first few sprints. As you test assumptions and address the risks, you are likely to discover that some of your assumptions were wrong and generate new ideas. The new insights and ideas make it necessary to change the product backlog, and some of the change can be rather big, particularly if your product is young. You will therefore benefit from a concise and coarse-grained backlog at the start of a new release.

But once you have addressed the key risks and critical assumptions, your focus shifts to completing and optimising the features, as I explain in my post “Get Your Focus Right: Learning and Execution in Scrum“. At this point your product backlog should start to stabilise and experience fewer and smaller changes. As a consequence, you can add more details to it.

As a rule of thumb, use few details at the start of a project or release and more once you have addressed the key risks and the product backlog has started to stabilise.

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Conclusion

Use the product lifecycle and release cycle to determine how detailed the product backlog should be. This is true for traditional backlogs as well as Jeff Patton’s storymaps and my Product Canvas. To put it simple, the more uncertainty and change you experience the more coarse-grained and concise the backlog should be.

As your product develops and grows adjust your product backlog and the way you manage it. There is no one right level of detail.

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Learn more

You can learn more about the product backlog by reading my book “Agile Product Management with Scrum” or by attending my Certified Scrum Product Owner training course. Please contact me for onsite courses and webinars.

 

The post If you’re planning to quit your job. This is the card to write your resignation letter on. appeared first on The Poke.

Motorola's flagship phone has gotten bigger every year – to the point where this year's Moto X Style (or "Pure Edition" in the U.S.) is more a rival to the iPhone 6 Plus than to the smaller iPhone 6. Let's break down how the two phablets compare.

.. Continue Reading Moto X Style (Pure Edition) vs. iPhone 6 Plus

Section: Mobile Technology

Tags:

• Smartphones
• Motorola
• Moto X
• Product Comparison
• iPhone 6 Plus
• Apple

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What does Motorola do to try and upstage the madness that was OnePlus’ unveiling of the OnePlus 2, yesterday? They gave us three phones! Or four. Or…we’re all confused. One thing is for sure, Motorola is releasing a US flagship phone called the Moto X Pure Edition, which is known everywhere else in the world as the Moto X Style (see, confusing!). 

While the phone won’t be out until September, we spent a good amount of time with it this morning. We walked through all of the Moto features, like Voice, Display, Assist, and Actions. Yep, they are all in the “Pure Edition,” even though others are incorrectly reporting that Motorola has stripped that out. We fired up the camera in the poorly lit demo room (nothing to report from that bad of a lighting situation) and snapped some quick pics. We looked at a variety of colors, all of which will be available for you to choose from. We experienced the Pure Edition for as long as we could.

Overall, the phone feels and looks like a bigger version of last year’s Moto X (2nd gen). You get Moto Maker customizations, have an identical design, and that same lovely close-to-stock Android experience that we all enjoy. I can’t say that I was blown away by the phone because it was so similar, but it certainly didn’t turn me off. I’m sure it’ll be a fine phone when finished and available, especially at its more-than-reasonable $399 starting point.

Unfortunately, since the phone won’t be out for another month or two, our time was limited. For now, enjoy the quick hands-on video below.

 

Moto X Pure Edition (2015) First Impressions and Tour! is a post from: Droid Life

Plankton are best known for their greatest hits: producing organic compounds, being devoured by krill, drifting aimlessly on the ocean's upper layer. You've read about those ditties so many times, you might think you've seen all plankton have to offer. They don't play catch, they don't go outside when you ask them to, and they most certainly won't retrieve the newspaper. What are they good for?

How dare you beseech plankton! They are beautiful! They are complex! They are surprising! For example, certain species of plankton are bioluminescent; they produce a substance that glows in the dark. That process is what you see in the photograph above, taken by Pooyan Shadpoor, a member of National Geographic's Your Shot community. The effect is beautiful to the human eye, but is actually intended to scare away predators. Plankton: they survive with style.

Bioluminescence occurs in a variety of phytoplankton and animal plankton, and can be green, orange, red, and of course blue. Because it's Monday, spend some time scrolling through a Google image search for "bioluminescent plankton."

Last month, Google introduced an "Undo Send" option for all Gmail users, allowing anybody to recall messages up to 30 seconds after sending them. However, if 30 seconds isn't enough time for you to spot an error (or realize that that's actually a totally inappropriate thing to say to your boss), then you might want to try Dmail: a Chrome extension that allows Gmail users to revoke access to an email any time after sending. You can even set a self-destructing timer that automatically makes an email inaccessible an hour, a day, or a week later.

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Dmail doesn't actually delete messages from users' inboxes

Perhaps the most useful thing about Dmail is that it works even if not installed on a recipient's computer. This is because the service doesn't actually delete messages from users' inboxes, but instead encrypts and decrypts them on demand. Users who receive a Dmail and don't have the extension installed are shown a "View Message" button that opens the email in a new tab. (If they do have Dmail installed, then the message is just shown within Gmail.) After a sender revokes access to an email — either manually or automatically — recipients are informed that "this message has been destroyed and is no longer available."

Dmail's Eric Kuhn explains to TechCrunch that whenever a user sends a message with the service, it's encrypted locally on their machine with a standard 256-bit algorithm. "An encrypted copy of that email is sent to a datastore controlled by Dmail. The recipient of the email is sent both the location of that datastore, as well as a key to view the decrypted message," says Kuhn. "Neither Gmail nor Dmail servers ever receive both the decryption key and encrypted message. Only the recipient and sender can read the email legibly."

If you revoke access to an embarrassing email, you'll still have to explain why

It's a neat trick, but it's not quite the same as deleting a sent email remotely. This means that using Dmail as a security measure makes more sense than as a face-saving "Undo Send" option. After all, if you do revoke access to a message a few minutes after sending, you'll still have to explain to the recipient what was so regrettable about the email in the first place. (The excuse "Oh, I'm just testing this new service out" only works the first couple of times.)

Still, Dmail is slick and easy to use, and the team responsible (part of social bookmarking service Delicious) have plans to extend its functionality, rolling out support for iOS and Android later this year, as well as hopefully adding a "self-destruct" functionality to document attachments. They also have plans to make Dmail a freemium service, with extra options for paying businesses and power users. Until then you can try the Dmail beta for free here.

Never ask the internet to photoshop something for you, it is never going to go well.

1. Because people are unhelpful

2. People are cruel

3. And people are just bloody awful really.

4. I mean

5. It’s just mean

6. It’s probably easier just to learn photoshop yourself

7. Than to have to sift through all of this nonsense

8. oh

9. So so cruel.

The post Another Example Of Why You Should Never Ask The Internet To Photoshop Anything appeared first on The Poke.

We've known for a while now that Top Gear would continue on without Jeremy Clarkson, and now we know who will replace him as host: Chris Evans (no, not that one). The British TV and radio host signed a three-year deal, according to the Top Gear website.

Evans became a public figure after a successful decade-long run hosting a weekday morning show on Channel 4 called The Big Breakfast. He's hosted a number of other British television and radio shows, and has even made guest appearances on Top Gear. Production on the Evans-led version of Top Gear will start in the next few weeks, and will air in 2016, according to the release.

Evans will replace Clarkson, but will the fans stick around?

We found out that Clarkson was let go in March...

Continue reading…

As I always say, the release of an Apple product is never a bad thing – I just see it as an opportunity for people to make some pretty funny jokes about them. Naturally, being the hottest thing at the moment, even The Tonight Show‘s Jimmy Fallon had to have a go at Apple’s smartwatch, the Apple Watch, as part of their regular segment, Pros and Cons. In it, Fallon details some humours Pros and Cons of buying the Apple Watch, and some are absolute killers. Check it out below:

My personal favourite is “Pro: It comes in a variety of colours. Con: Like ‘Please Rob Me’ Silver and ‘Walking Target’ Gold”. There’s of course no denying that Apple has jumped on the smartwatch bandwagon just at the right time, but really we shouldn’t be concerned by how many Apple Watches are being sold – after all, they only work with iPhones anyway. All the same, it’s helping to grow the smartwatch industry and its mainstream appeal, which can only be a good thing for everybody in the long run.

What do you think of Jimmy Fallon’s Pros and Cons of buying an Apple Watch? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

Source: YouTube

The post Jimmy Fallon explores the Pros and Cons of buying an Apple Watch appeared first on AndroidSPIN.

An emergency video call between Nick Fury and the World Security Council runs into serious technical difficulties.

Trending: Recent Daily Mail reader’s comments as motivational posters

The post Avengers: Age of Technical Difficulties appeared first on The Poke.

The post Tory Name Genrator appeared first on The Poke.

The Galaxy S6 is Samsung's most aggressive step forward yet in the mobile space. Though we aren't ready to publish our full review, we have some early thoughts on our experience of using the GS6... Continue Reading Samsung Galaxy S6: Early impressions

Section: Mobile Technology

Tags: Samsung, Samsung Galaxy S6, Smartphones

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• Samsung teases shadowy Galaxy S4 image
• Samsung launches Wi-Fi only version of its Galaxy Camera
• Samsung Galaxy S5 may feature eye scanner

Florian de Looij first sat down with a copy of Photoshop when he was 12 years old and apparently he never got up. The Netherlands-based designer has been exploring digital animation and illustration ever since, and late last year started sharing his animation experiments on a Tumblr called FLRN GIF. Florian says he’s always been inspired by the likes of M.C. Escher and other artists working with optical illusions, something that has clearly influenced the direction of his design practice. He tries to make a new GIF each day, and you can see tons more in his archives. (via Cross Connect)

This method of getting a duvet into a cover is apparently ‘life changing’, or ‘overly complicated’, ‘pointless’ or a ‘palava’ depend on what YouTube comments you side with.

Trending: Man puts fake self-help books on display in bookstore

The post This duvet hack video will ‘change your life forever’ appeared first on The Poke.

If you own a Chromecast, or any Cast supporting device, while also happen to enjoy a bit of tennis, you should check out Motion Tennis Cast on Google Play. Using your phone like a Wii Remote, your tennis swing motions are sent through the phone, putting you in matches against bots and time attack trials. 

Thinking back to the days of Nintendo’s Wii, Motion Tennis can have you running around the living room, getting a nice little workout in while you do it. In fact, the game is powered by Edison Award winning Rolomotion technology that “converts raw data from a smartphone’s multiple built-in sensors into precise natural gestures.” This technology also helps calculate the number of calories burnt while playing the game, which helps you keep fitness on your mind.

As stated in the video, support for Android Wear devices is currently in the works, which could make for very realistic tennis motions being made in your house soon. Could be fun, right?

Check it out on Google Play.

Play Link

Motion Tennis Cast Lets You Play Tennis in the House Thanks to Chromecast is a post from: Droid Life

Many of us can get a severe case of brain-freeze during meetings – Michael Spicer has some useful tips on how to sound like the smartest, most confident person in the room.

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Trending: 22 Reasons To Love Ireland

The post How to appear confident in meetings appeared first on The Poke.

USB Type-C, featured on Apple’s new MacBook and Google’s new Chromebook Pixel, is coming to Android phones. In a video from Google which goes over the benefits of USB Type-C, product manager Adam Rodriguez states that the company is very committed to the new spec, and that upcoming Chromebooks and Android phones will see it in the near future. 

USB Type-C delivers power, display, and data through a single port, allowing device makers to slim down on the need for excessive ports and cables running from a machine. Unlike micro-USB, USB Type-C features a symmetrical design, enabling users to plug it into a device anyway they would like. No more plugging in your micro-USB cable the wrong way.

The video that Google published talking about Type-C has been placed below. To hear the part about Android phones, skip to the very end.

USB Type-C to be on next Nexus device? Quite possibly.

Google: USB Type-C Coming to Android Phones in Near Future is a post from: Droid Life

The new MacBook represents Apple's vision for "the future of the notebook." That future is defined by thinness, lightness, and an almost total abandonment of external connectivity ports. Other than the mandatory headphone jack, there's just one port available on the MacBook: a USB Type-C connection that takes care of power, data transfers, and display output. Here's how Apple explains its choice of connector:

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"As long as we were going to include a port for charging the new MacBook, we wanted to make sure it was the most advanced and versatile one available."

There was once a time when Apple saw the connected future built around a pair of boldly titled interconnects: Thunderbolt for laptops and desktop computers, and Lightning for its mobile iOS devices. But the company's pursuit of a completely wireless laptop now bodes poorly for the future of Thunderbolt and even casts some doubt over the long-term prospects of Lightning.

Co-developed by Intel and Apple and introduced in the 2011 MacBook Pro, Thunderbolt promised to be the thing that made us leave USB behind. In simple terms, Thunderbolt is a much fatter and faster pipe for data transfers than USB, and it makes it possible to connect big storage arrays and high-resolution displays to your MacBook. Some four years after its introduction, however, Thunderbolt is still narrowly focused on high-end applications and hasn't been adopted or aggressively promoted by many PC makers beyond Apple.

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The future is easy and convenient like USB, not superpowered like Thunderbolt

USB 3.1 with the smaller, reversible USB Type-C usurps the entire purpose of Thunderbolt cables for regular consumers. It lets you plug in your external hard drives — which make up the vast majority of the 50 Thunderbolt products on Apple's online store — and pushes video out to external displays. Type-C is easier to use than Thunderbolt and appears to be cheaper to implement, making it a no-brainer upgrade. Simple, less expensive, and still fast.

Apple is stridently asserting the new MacBook as its best MacBook ever, and its choice of interconnect is telling. The future, at least for mainstream consumers, is easy and convenient like USB instead of superpowered but expensive like Thunderbolt. The established high-end connector isn't going away immediately, as Apple used yesterday's event to also announce Thunderbolt 2 upgrades for the MacBook Air and Pro, but it will be swimming upstream to remain relevant in the face of an oncoming deluge of Type-C peripherals and devices.

The ubiquity of USB has already assisted in the demise of one Apple-led interconnect, FireWire, whose downfall began in similar fashion to today. FireWire was first phased out in 2008 in Apple's consumer laptops — which is exactly what the new MacBook is — and then disappeared from the Pro lineup within four years. Coincidentally, it was Thunderbolt that stepped into FireWire's place as the solution for high-speed connection needs.

Fat Thunderbolt connectors will never be used to connect or charge your phone, but that's what the new USB cable can do, and mobile devices like the Nokia N1 tablet are already moving to adopt it. I suspect we'll see USB Type-C embraced widely and quickly, with it serving to replace Micro USB cables for phones and simplifying many people's lives.

Who needs Lightning when the new USB connector is just as good?

That leaves Apple's Lightning connector for mobile devices as a big fat question mark. Lightning was a great upgrade over Apple's previous 30-pin connector, but its symmetrical design and ability to both power a device and transfer data from it are now duplicated by USB Type-C. From a user's perspective, there's little reason to want Lightning over Type-C. The former is an Apple-only standard, whereas the latter is destined to become the universal method for connecting anything to everything.

Philips has been first to use Lightning for the unconventional purpose of connecting headphones to your iPhone. First and, so far, last. It's a little surprising not to see greater enthusiasm for a wider range of Lightning peripherals, but then the licensing costs associated with it are probably substantial enough to curtail experimentation. Accessory companies seem to be focusing on making the popular types of peripherals that will recoup their licensing fees. It's those same licensing revenues that Apple enjoys that lead me to doubt it would want to ever mess with its Lightning connector. Plus, Lightning is a tiny bit thinner than Type-C, which actually matters in mobile devices that are starting to struggle to fit the headphone jack.

The road to complete wireless freedom is paved with USB connectors

Even if it would make the world a better place by harmonizing all mobile devices around a single cable standard, replacing Lightning with USB Type-C appears unlikely. There's no reason why Lightning and USB Type-C can't coexist: Apple just needs to put one connector on either side of the cable (and probably bundle that cable in its next iPhone's box). The newly detailed Apple Watch also shows that the company isn't quite ready to fully commit to Type-C for all its wired needs. In spite of representing the latest in Apple's technology, the Watch uses a full-size USB plug for its charging cradle, making it slightly less futuristic but a lot more widely compatible.

Wireless everything is evidently Apple's overarching objective. The bridge to getting us there, on the evidence of the new MacBook, will be USB Type-C. The Thunderbolt's rumble has been quietened, and the Lightning's shine has been dulled. The omnipresent USB port looks set to retain its title as the world's favorite connector, only in a slimmer, prettier, and easier shape.

by @davelee1968

The post Tweet response of the day appeared first on The Poke.

Earlier today Penguin books decided to offer some helpful book-buying advice for Mother’s Day, unfortunately they used the hashtag #YourMum

Guess what? It didn’t go at all to plan. We didn’t help.

Your mum’ s vibrator batteries have arrived #yourmum pic.twitter.com/HllKVrF4Dt

— The Poke (@ThePoke) March 9, 2015

But people still offered helpful suggestions.

#YourMum is so fat her blood type is gravy.

— Owen Teahan (@owenteahan82) March 9, 2015

After the success of the #YourMum hashtag for Mothering Sunday, Penguin Books announces #2Girls1Cup for the Wimbledon Ladies' final.

— James Martin (@Pundamentalism) March 9, 2015

I’m sure #YourMum would like this. @PenguinUKBooks pic.twitter.com/yne1eHkSJh

— Brandy Snap (@Brandy_Snap) March 9, 2015

Well, as helpful as anyone on the internet ever is.

Just chopped a pepper in half and it looked like your mum’s undercarriage. #YourMum pic.twitter.com/Ge3kXbB0qq

— Bacardi Oakheart (@Midgetgems26) March 9, 2015

Hey @PenguinUKBooks, #YourMum asked me to empty her dishwasher… pic.twitter.com/S6VpSukn7F

— Michael. (@_mtah_) March 9, 2015

#YourMum is like a Penguin Book. Common, cheap & available at railway stations

— Bernie Bantspants (@bernieforkin) March 9, 2015

@flashboy @elenacresci @PenguinUKBooks I love the smell of old books. Nothing better to put my face in #YourMum

— Ryan Broderick (@broderick) March 9, 2015

Like Penguin didn't know #YourMum pic.twitter.com/yNRDAsscQF

— Felicity Morse (@FelicityMorse) March 9, 2015

Of course some cynics suggested that it wasn’t a mistake, simply an attempt by Penguin to get the topic (and themselves) trending.

Somewhere a social media marketing guru is already writing a thinkpiece on how #YourMum turned out to be the campaign of the year

— Martin Belam (@MartinBelam) March 9, 2015

Thanks for pointing our #YourMum has an alternative meaning you guys! Now back to the books…

— Penguin Books UK (@PenguinUKBooks) March 9, 2015

The post The perils of not thinking through the #YourMum hashtag appeared first on The Poke.

Yep, this just went out. The timing, we love, Google.

Google Drops New Android Wear Commercial Moments Before Apple Watch Event is a post from: Droid Life

If you think optical image stabilization (OIS) is a gimmick that exists merely to allow manufacturers to hype up their latest smartphone camera, you need to watch this video. A simple demo put together by Samsung demonstrates exactly what OIS does and why it is actually quite useful in helping you take the best photos possible.

We slid in an iPhone 6 for comparison. It lacks OIS altogether (you need to pony up for the iPhone 6 Plus to get that feature). We’ll let the results speak for themselves.

For more on how the cameras of the Galaxy S6 and iPhone 6 stack up, see our full comparison post.

Now there’s an even easier way to get social services to pay you a visit – get your kids talking about how much they like to play with poo and balls!

Thankfully Weird Asia News clarifies that Poo & Balls is actually a toy for kids age one and up that contains little Pooh lookalike bears and balls that spin around.

Anyone looking (?) to get their own ‘Lovely Push ‘n’ Spin Poo & Balls’ can do so here. You’re welcome.

Trending: Please help out these first world charities

The post India unveils ‘Poo & Balls’ toy appeared first on The Poke.

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