40 preview customers, 34 builds, 3 launch events, 1 product. That's what it took to launch our Agile Portfolio Management solution. Following Rally's latest customer development project (see Ryan’s Lean Startup post), here's how it all happened and Rally's gift to you for the holiday season…
40 Preview Customers
A year ago, we put a call out to the Agile community. We knew to get it right, we had to first learn how customers currently 
managed their strategic plans, and the challenges they were encountering. So we scheduled many, many interviews talking to development managers, product managers and program managers currently working in large Agile development organizations to identify our “earlyvangelists”: those feeling the pain and feeling it badly enough that they crafted a way to solve it. We found most of the earlyvangelists were using Excel as their strategic planning solution – quite a flexible option for planning, but very tedious and manual to track development status of these plans.
As we dug deeper, a common set of needs quickly emerged from these interviews:
- Highly customizable - Every organization seems to use different terms to refer to their strategic levels (features, projects, themes, epics, SAGAs, etc.), and how many strategic levels they tracked. There is often a strong attachment to that taxonomy.
- High-level development status - Too much time is spent in Excel collating development status information to inform audiences outside of development. Questions such as: Did we start that initiative? Will we be able to deliver that work by this date? How much time have we spent so far working on this thing?
- Tracking marketable items – As Agile has scaled in development, the business is drowning in user stories and needs a way to track additional information such as: value, risk, high level size, cost and sometimes unique information like the name of the product manager accountable for delivering a feature.
- Realistic roadmaps – Roadmaps are mostly created in PowerPoint without accounting for actual development capacity. That results in overly optimistic plans and missed expectations. The challenge is exacerbated when teams cannot be fully cross-functional because the value to deliver requires specialized skills, often with limited yet high-demand capacity.
- Alignment reports - There is a need to report back to the business that development is on track with the strategic goals. Most often those are created in Excel by manually and tediously pulling information from existing tools.
From that list of identified needs, we created our backlog of features to build in our MVP (Minimum Viable Product), and took names of customers willing to install it. What was in it for them? Helping us build a supported solution to their current challenges.
We also engaged with Rally coaches and industry experts, like Dean Leffingwell, to ensure our solution would support practical and proven ways to scaling Agile.
34 Builds
Our very first MVP was actually provided to us by one of those preview customers who had been trying to solve the problem on his own – a true sign of an earlyvangelist! Thank you, Stephen, for your contribution to this project.
The MVP – named Project Stratus – was a rich client application connected to the Rally platform. That separate application allowed us to clearly separate our development resources – those focused on our current product roadmap – from our customer development resources, and to iterate quickly to incorporate earlyvangelists feedback. We produced 34 builds in that period, about 3 each month.
Once it became obvious that we were on to something of great value to the Agile community, we started allocating core development resources to implement the critical features in our flagship product, Rally ALM.
Our hypothesis of providing a separate application well integrated with Rally was invalidated. Earlyvangelists were clear: they expected to have both strategy and execution solutions in one single environment, so the strategy was visible to development teams and execution information was available when building strategic plans.
3 Launch Events
After 34 builds, we are ready to launch the product to all customers! To unveil our entire Agile Portfolio Management solution, we are getting on the road and rallying software and business celebrities to share their knowledge on the need for businesses to join the Agile curve. We will launch our solution in the Bay Area, Boston and Dallas. In-person attendees will have the opportunity to:
- Meet industry experts such Geoffrey Moore, Dean Leffingwell and Dave West
- Meet preview users, from Getty Images, The CBORD Group and John Deere, to learn how they used the highly-functioning MVP to help steer their Agile portfolios over the last year
- Participate in breakout sessions to get up close and personal with our Agile Portfolio Management solution
Not to foreshadow too much, this launch signals a major advancement for the Agile community, one that links the business and technical parts in agility. Now that is what we like to call – Scaling Agility.
1 Product
On Dec 6, we will launch the first increment of our Agile Portfolio Management product. That increment will address the most critical needs identified above. As 2012 unfolds, we will continuously deliver additional increments of the product roadmap that we validated in our customer development effort.
Don't miss the chance to kick off Agile Portfolio Management in your organization! We are sending quite a crew of Rally folks to each launch event to answer questions and demo our solution. We hope you will jump on that opportunity!
To sign up, register at www.rallydev.com/rpm for your preferred city. If you cannot attend live, sign up for the webcasts that will broadcast a portion of the live events.
(This post is the eighth in our series Scaling Agile to the Strategic Level)
Catherine Connor is Product Marketing director at Rally Software, with a passion for bringing Agile to product management. She loves hiking the Colorado foothills and cheering on the University of Colorado women's basketball team.
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