Curing Feature-itis

Topic: Curing Feature-itis: Using metrics to build the right features to increase customer engagement and adoption

Presenter: Todd Olson

Overview: For many Agile teams, delivering software is the end of a journey. We ship one feature, have a beer, and move on to the next highest feature on the product backlog. However, shipping software is simply the beginning. Several studies cite that users on average use less than 30% of the features in a software application, yet our goals and metrics seem more aligned with shipping more features. Agile teams talk more about increasing throughput or reducing cycle time than building features that better engage with their users, so in some ways, Agile has actually accelerated the pace of 'feature-itis.'

This talk introduces practices to shift an organization's focus and process from simply building features quickly to building the right features quickly. We'll discuss how to build and ship features smarter by combining insight with actions to increase feature adoption and better meet customer needs. We'll introduce techniques to collect data -- lots of data -- on user interactions and then distill that data into insights used to better prioritize future backlogs. We'll show how this data can be used to streamline a user's experience in your software and increase the breadth of usage.

About the Speaker: Todd Olson is the CEO and founder of the newly formed software analytics startup, Pendo. He recently served as Vice President of Products at Rally Software Development Corp. where he led the evolution of Rally's proven Agile ALM platform for enabling software and product-driven enterprises.

He has technology thought-leadership and a pioneering, entrepreneurial spirit. He co-founded 6th Sense Analytics, Inc., served as its President and Chief Technology Officer and led the fundraising of $7 million in seed capital. He was Chief Scientist of the Together business unit of Borland Software that he joined as a result of the successful acquisition of TogetherSoft. Prior to 2002, he served as Vice President of Product Development of TogetherSoft Corp., and was responsible for leading the Together® product line. After graduating from Carnegie Mellon University (B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering and graduate of the Entrepreneurial Management program), Todd co-founded Cerebellum Software Inc. and served as its Chief Technology Officer. Todd frequently speaks at leading industry events on the topics of Agile software development, Product Management, and entrepreneurism.