Business Model Canvas and

I completed reading "User Story Mapping" by Jeff Patton with Peter Economy and I find it to be a good read for Product Owners and Product Managers specifically. What I like about it is the simplicity on the approach and the methodology they recommended. Most of us from the enterprise software world are usually skeptical because we always say that this will work for startup but not enterprise companies; we have too many people, we are geographically spread, our products are too big/complex, etc. Guess what ? They actually have an example on the work they did with SAP for one of SAP's product. While it took a few more steps for the enterprise, it did its job and I think worth trying.

My team is currently doing our sprint planning and estimating what we need to achieve by the end of this quarter. We are looking at releasing our early prototypes to our partners and building an internal release process where Oracle employees from around the world can have an early access and try our product and give us quick feedback. I called it the community edition. The one we for the partners will be called the enterprise edition.

I managed to apply what I read in the book in our planning this week and like what the book said about stories, I facilitated the discussion as such that each one of us can narrate the stories of the functionalities to anyone in the future. The who and why the functionality needs to be there for the CE and EE version were central to our discussions. I left the technical decisions on how to implement it to the engineers for now as I don't want to be too prescriptive. They are to get back to me early next week with the implementation design and I am looking forward to see if our little story mapping exercise has helped them to better understanding the requirements.

With the two product managers that I have, we developed v1.0 of our Migration Platform on the business model canvas. We had our early thoughts. Over the last month, there were developments and more information that warrants a re-look to our initial canvas and so we did. A few more sticky pads went up and now we are clearer with the priorities as well. We need to pivot like a startup but this is how we can be agile within a huge organization. Maybe I should write a bit more on this in the future.

This trip to Beijing was a fruitful one, looking forward to be there next month to see if what we planned turns to fruition. Next up for me is to go to Yogyakarta to meet and make some friends, build new network and share some of my journey as a development manager in a techtalk session organized by my friend's company that develops Qiscus. That would be something I will write about next.