Product Strategy Meeting

Priscilla, Sheila, Mimi, Katie

Agenda

• What are all of the pieces that influence the vision?
  • What are the constraints?
• What is the best way to get consensus on these pieces?
  • Group brainstorm?
  • Collect feedback?
  • Put a proposal out?
  • Strategy for the above?
  • Ordering of pieces?
• Timeframe goals
  • When do we go public with this process?
  • What other communications are necessary?
• What is necessary to support the vision/goal?
  • Branding?

Pieces that influence the vision

• 1 year timeframe (Q1 2007)
• Ecosystem - scooby, Cosmo and Chandler
• OSAF Values
  • user choice -- interoperability, cross platform (don't lock user into a particular choice, anti monopoly)
  • gtd -- help people get stuff done (innovative pim value)
  • community -- leveraging via open source (related to user choice)

• Not starting from scratch
  • Working code that we have already
  • Existing designs
  • Architecture decisions

• 2 year timeframe for needing funding strategy
  • need real users

• GOAL: figure out who the early adopters will be, who the users will be
• Available resources

Original motivations

• small workgroup collaboration
• personal information management
• data hub, semantic web
• hypercard-like end user scriptable app
• p2p sharing
• calendars without it
• agenda
• Mission statement

Stakeholders

• Mitch
• CSG
• staff
• community

Branding exercise is a good source of data about what chandler means to staff/community.

Questions that need answers

• email strategy
• target user
• scooby 1.0 plan
• cosmo caldav? does it have chandler smarts?
• how large does the repository need to scale to for performance?

Other products in the market

• Enterprise: Outlook, oracle, lotus notes
• AJAX calendar innovation: zimbra, etc.
• Lightweight clients: Outlook express, vista, apple ical
• Web pims: yahoo/hotmail, gmail
• PDA: palm, blackberry, windows ce

Million $ question: What combination of things that we have done (and/or can do relatively quickly/easily) are unique and valuable?

Possible next steps

• Proposal: Write up list of things that need to be factored into the vision. Rank order prioritizing. Build logical reasoning for how you stack the issues. Make sure that people are confident that we have all of the pieces in place.

• vision ==> Ecosystem product strategy

• Brainstorm about the constraints? Put forward a proposal?

• Rank ordering -- take influences and triage them into things we need to focus on, stuff we're keeping in the back of our heads to not paint ourselves into a corner, stuff we are not doing.
  • What are we rank ordering? How should we frame this?
  • What is the master and what is the servant?

• Triage the process: propose rank ordering

• Separate out constraints from values

Actual Next Actions

• Consolidate existing information
• Summarizing, write up short background pieces

• Tell people the steps we are going to take, what is the goal of the exercise, dates
• Put forward a proposal, with assumptions and influences -- get feedback and additions (1 week)
• Propose a rank ordering -- get feedback on rank ordering (1 week)
• User problems, target users (2 weeks)
  • perhaps give people options to rank

End result: a product definition. Later steps:

• Rework roadmaps
• Rewrite vision statement

What involvement do we want?

• Exposed to thought process?
• Get buy in?
• Help answer some questions?
• Not everyone has whole picture: put things into context
• Not everyone is clear on what is a product strategy. Going through process it becomes clear that the product strategy is not an opinionated product team, but that it is grounded in history and that there is a rationalization.
• Any ground rules for the discussions?
  • Be upfront about what is not on the table for discussion.
  • Be clear about how we want people to participate in the conversation.
• Make it obvious where people can contribute, and where people can add information and feedback

Goal of exercise

• Come up with a product definition for 1.0