At times we have great product ideas but the biggest barrier to entry lies in answering few questions such as:

- How do I define and validate Problem hypothesis, Solution hypothesis and Underlying assumptions?

- How do I quickly setup a platform for people to register their interest?

- What will keep the potential customers engaged, excited until the first release (or beta) is out?

- How do I get feedback from the early adopters?

- And eventually when I have answers to some of these questions, how do I make a decision to persevere or pivot?

If you've faced a challenge while answering any of these questions while building/validating your product idea, this session is for you. We'll look at tools and techniques to validate the product hypothesis early-on without spending months or fortunes. We'll also look at a case study to highlight how some of these tools, techniques helped us validate our product idea.

[24]7 Customer, Inc started out in customer service space from Bangalore in 2000. Today, it is a sucessful mid-size company in voice-based customer support that also creates IP and products in big data and predictive analytics for some of the biggest names in business, and is a a high-growth company headquartered out of US. The growth in product R&D happened both organically as well as from acquisitions across multiple geos. While the initial / startup stage processes had been extremely successful in building the company's strong foundation, it was felt that the next stage of growth might not be a linear extrapolation of the past successes. Recognizing this futuristic need, it initially embraced agile software development methods in Q1 of 2013 to improve responsiveness, predictability and time to market in the product development organization. In Q2 of 2013, it embarked upon an ambitious company-wide program. The charter was to establish an end-to-end execution framework to make the entire operations efficient and effective - right from marketing and pre-sales to delivery, deployment, operations and ongoing optimization. 

In this session,

• We will analyze challanges involved in scaling-up agile adoption outside the software team across the entire organization.
• Specifically, we will also discuss how we addressed some of those unique challanges that are associated with growth and scale, and
• What does it take to achieve true end-to-end agility. 

Yellow or dry leaves of a tree have more to do with its root, rather than its color, which is just an indication of need to water the roots. For a tree to flourish, to bear green leaves, with fruits, it’s the root that needs to be watered

This is to say, put focus and care into your core every day and then the rest of the things will simply flourish and express itself.

At times, we are too busy in discussing and analyzing things at a very high level, trying to improve the color of the yellow leaves of the trees, by applying patches, thereby ignoring watering its root.

We are so obsessed with achieving better results every time, that ,metrics, processes and numbers become the focus of discussion in the organization. We keep on doing the same thing again and again, and expect different results, every time.

Measure more, measure accurately, implement jazzy-flashy processes with new fashioned terminologies of promises of skyrocketing results, make everyone occupied, and reduce cost at any cost!

And most of the times, you get the same results, or even worse.

Here are some of the things,I believe, are watering the tree of Product Development that bear the fruits of success.

• Focus on automated unit tests and refactoring the code every time you see an improvement opportunity, quality will take care of itself.
• Focus on having open, honest and professional discussions with customers; trusted partnership will take care of itself.
• Promote culture of failing fast and encourage making mistakes, time to market and innovation will take care of itself.
• Implement the DNA of Value Flow into the organization, and cost will take care of itself.
• Focus on respecting and improving skills of the people in your organization, the results will take care of itself
• Destroy the cubicles , both physically and mentally,  and the waste will have a tough time to find a place.
• Focus on building great teams; and great products will take care of itself.

Company culture, or its DNA, is one of the most important factors to determing if a company succeeds.  Many companies claim to have great company culture.  But what does this mean, how can you know if your company has a great culture, and how can you go about improving the culture?  This talk will explore what great companies have in common, and share experiences I have had in helping to develop engineering culture during my career.    

Will also explore how Agile principles help to foster creating the best possible culture for your organization.

Everything we do depends for its quality on thinking we do first. Our thinking depends on the quality of our attention for each other.

A Thinking environment is the set of ten conditions under which human being can 'think' for themselves - with rigour, imaginaton, courage and grace. A Thinking Environment is natural, but rare. It has been squeezed out of our lives and organisations by inferior ways of treating each other.

Thinking environment is based on ten behaviours that generate the finest thinking, and have become known as The Ten Components of a Thinking Environment. These components are

• Attention,
• Equality,
• Ease,
• Appreciation,
• Encouragement,
• Feelings,
• Information,
• Diversity,
• Incisive Questions and
• Place.

Each Component is powerful individually, but the presence of all ten working together gives this process its transformative impact.

Owing to internal and external demands and market place pressure, Services Companies have learned the hard way of executing the projects in agile like way. Irony is that, most of the contracts / Master Service agreements / Statements of work remained traditional ‘legal’ intensified subject matter. This is one of the top most impediment to realize benefits of agile like flexibility, collaboration and win-win strategy etc..

Agile is still a taboo in Marketing, sales, pre-sales, legal and finance functions of service companies. Each of these teams work in independently, and create suboptimal silos. There is a need of a framework which align these support function to enable an agile eco system.

This discussion is to bring perspectives and thought process related to the support / enabling functions of IT services and ponder on creating flow based approach, with each functions working to create a great agile experience to customer