Where Does Agile Thrive?

In this diagram from scrum.org the differnet scales show where agile development typically works best....

Forget Agile Development - You Need Agile Marketing

The term agile development is now pretty much established as the way to get web functionality built and launch. Focused on delivery of a minimum viable product it aims to build 'something but not everything' in a given time frame. It is so successful now, that marketing and commercial types have come to expect that their technical team or web agency can create nearly all of what they want in record time.

So now its time for a new term. So forget Agile Development for now, your business needs to adopt the practice of Agile Marketing!

Digital Product Design Has Arrived

The creation of a major product tended to be an opportunity practiced only by a limited number of major organisations. The process of: research & development, manufacturing and distribution was the domain of the large company who had time, budgets and resources available. 

These days getting digital products to market is simpler and speedier by comparison. You don't need huge departments taking ages to create something that either succeeds in a known category or fails & folds without trace... online products can be created, launched and refined much much easier. Product owners can now understand their use and customers quickly... then iterate, improve, evolve and pivot to create something better.

It used to be that a physical product portfolio was pretty much set in stone from day one. Deviating from it was difficult and ground breaking. Now digital products cut across categories and almost defy definition as they merge features and functions from multiple industries all at once.

Everything is now becoming software. Ideas are formed, mashed up and reformed in a single development cycle.. rather than being fixed from one product generation to the next.

• The pace has changed.
• The environment has changed.
• The approach has changed.

And the digital product manager is now able to create wonderfully useful and beautiful products that solve problems and look good too.

It is undoubtedly the age of the digital product and therefore the digital product owner or  designer is in the driving seat for the new economy.

Think Search Engine Optimisation is easy?

We often get new digital marketing clients come to us after hearing a lot of inaccuracies (or just plain lies) from others, so I thought it best to set down a points about SEO that might come as a surprise to those looking to hire a decent search engine optimisation company:

1. The improved placement of your site in search engines can’t be guaranteed. There are certain SEO things within our control such as on-site content, the code of your website and some in-bound links (e.g. from partners, etc.). But there is a lot beyond our control, such as how the search engines index & display sites, plus what the competition does… all of which may affect the positions of your site in the organic search engine result s (SERPs)
2. Reputable SEO agencies should not use any underhand or short-term 'black hat' SEO activity to gain an improvement, no matter how tempting this may be to the agency or the client. There's no instant way to get a significant lift in your site rankings without a lot of hard & genuine work. So don’t keep asking us to do it, or we will resign the account.
3. We are (to a certain extent) at the mercy of your web development agency to make code & configuration changes for the benefit of SEO. By the way, if that’s also us, then don’t worry. Your web developers may have their own opinions on what is good for SEO, we may have another...  we’re not saying we’re always right, but we may have the bigger perspective here.
4. SEO & PR now have to work together to be truly successful. We’ll therefore need access to either your in-house PR person or your PR agency. If you don’t have either then we can still do loads of great stuff, but our link-building activity may take longer.
5. We can't optimise your site without content... decent, credible, interesting, readable and shareable content. If you have no intention of producing it yourself, then we can suggest people for this job. But if you don’t want to use them… then the scope of how we can optimise your site is then limited.

In short, I don’t think Search Engine Optimisation is easy, although the positives of working in such an interesting and dynamic industry more than makes up for this.

How to get your mobile application right first time

I get asked quite a bit these days for advice on mobile platforms & applications. So I have asked Mark Walsh from Nation of Apps to answer a few questions on developing and delivering the right mobile app for businesses.

Once I have an idea for a mobile app, what’s the best process to follow to get it right first time?
There are a number of things that need to be thought through in detail. This starts with defining your mobile application requirements.
- What do you want your mobile app to do?
- What do you want to achieve with your app?
- Who is the target audience? Personas, Demographics.
- Do you have branding requirements?

How should I decide what platform to build for?
One of the key drivers to answer this question is regarding who will be using the app. It is important to understand your target audience and what mobile devices they use. Analytics from websites and apps that your target audience currently use can help with this. If you find the trend to be specifically more Android orientated, or iPhone orientated then there’s your answer.
If the app is targeted for specific business users, then it may well be that Blackberry should be the choice. It has been a common strategy for companies to develop mobile business applications first for iPhone, however this approach has often been flawed and the target audience found to be predominantly Blackberry users.

Mark's details:
company site: http://nationofapps.co.uk/
blog : http://www.nationofapps.co.uk/news-mobile-application-development.html
Twitter: @nationofapps

Agile Digital Strategy - part 3

This is the third part of a series of postings about Agile Digital Strategy. Part 1 and Part 2 are already available.

For those who lived and worked through the dot.com gold-rush and the subsequent bursting of the bubble, it was a frantic and intoxicating period of rapid product releases and constant delivery. All manner of effort was put into "just get it up there" in the hope that you had struck the right combination to make a fortune.

As we now know... like a powerful car without a steering wheel... effort with no direction is a flawed strategy.




What did we learn from this? Well....

1. Release cycles were much shorter.
   This was mainly out of fear that if you didn't get something up first, then you had lost the initiative and consequently market share of user eyeballs or registration sign-ups.
   
   However it taught us that we could get something out of the door quickly when we wanted to (although I'm sure there's a quality / effort / functionality diagram to highlight the inherent problems with this approach)
   
2. That in an unknown market, where you can't learn too much from what has gone before (A.K.A. making it up as you went along) just doesn't get you as far along your progression path as all your effort would indicate.