Presentation at P-Camp 2008 by Christina Noren, Splunk

1. P-CAMP: Automating
Unconference for Product Managers
Product Management in
an Agile World using Jira
Christina Noren, VP Product
Management, Splunk

2. Rule # 1:
If product managers don’t do their jobs,
the other departments will fill the void.
Practical Product Management Rules
Pragmatic Marketing © 2003
P-Camp 2008

3. Rule # 18:
In the absence of market facts, he who
owns the compiler wins.
Practical Product Management Rules
Pragmatic Marketing © 2003
P-Camp 2008

4. Welcome changing requirements,
even late in development.
from Principles behind the Agile Manifesto
© 2001 Kent Beck, Mike Beedle, Arie van Bennekum, Alistair Cockburn, Ward Cunningham, Martin Fowler
, James Grenning, Jim Highsmith, Andrew Hunt, Ron Jeffries, Jon Kern, Brian Marick, Robert C. Martin, Steve Mellor, Ken
Schwaber, Jeff Sutherland, Dave Thomas
P-Camp 2008

5. Who are we to talk?
• Splunk is the IT Search engine
- Indexes logs, configurations, metrics and all other IT data in real-time
- Search, alert, report and share knowledge for operations, security and compliance
• >150,000 downloads & >550 Enterprise licenses sold in 2.5 years
- 21st Century Insurance, Aetna, BEA, British Telecom, Catholic Healthcare West, Chevron,
Cisco, Comcast, Dow Jones, LinkedIn, Motorola, NASA, Orbitz, Raytheon, Riverbed,
Shopzilla, T-Mobile, Telstra, Thomson, Verisign, Verizon, Visa, and Vodafone all use Splunk
• Splunk powers a growing list of hardware & software offerings
- Ironport, Netcordia, Penguin Computing, Proofpoint, Radware, St. Bernard Software,
Strongmail, TriGeo, Uptime Software and Voltage Security are all Powered by Splunk
• Poised for growth
•
P-Camp 2008

6. Open approach changes everything
• Free download
• High touch
- support@splunk.com alias open to everyone
- IRC with real developers (and ascii art)
• Open architecture & APIs
• SplunkBase community application sharing
• Public documentation
• Public roadmap
• Blogs and developer videos, even about new R&D
P-Camp 2008

7. Agile at Splunk
• Development-driven
- Splunk’ s dev team wanted to move faster and be more scalable
• Embraced by the business
- Obviously the way to stay ahead of the competition
• Loosely SCRUM
- 5-7 scrum teams at any time
- 2-4 week sprints, some sprints are design or QA focused
- Burndown list at start of each sprint
• Preview releases for continuous customer delivery
P-Camp 2008

8. Agile PM worries
• No roadmap
- We’d be open, yet not coherent to customers and the field
• No market, competitive inputs
- Decisionmaking bias toward the loudest customers
• De facto positioning of new features
- With constant change, the old approach of positioning first wouldn’t work
• PMs wouldn’t be able to be there for key decisions
- Everyday decisions, yet PMs need to be in the field
- Sheer number of separate teams relative to PM headcount
P-Camp 2008

9. A practical solution: extending Jira for PM
• Already in place for engineering requirements & bugs
- Not a black box PM tool
• Highly extensible
- Custom workflows, reports, issue types, link types, accelerators, automation
• No more static documents to get out of date
• Engaged New Aspects of Software
• Not cheaper than buying off-the-shelf
- More digestible, easier to integrate
P-Camp 2008

10. Issue type model
JIRA
backlog
Cases Bugs
support@splunk.com inputs
P4 Enhancement Requirements
Cases Requests
Problem
Call Reports Features
Statements
customer meetings and calls
roadmap
Market
Datapoints
market & competitive
analysis
P-Camp 2008

11. Custom workflows
• Enhancement requests:
- New ERs come from CRM system
- PMs scope them by linking to PSs, reject or invalidate them
• Market datapoints and call reports:
- New MDs and CRs entered by PMs, sometimes engineering
- PMs scope them by linking to PSs
• Problem statements:
- PMs enter them, start scoping them, finish scoping them, define requirements for them
• Features:
- PMs enter them, define them by linking to PSs and requirements
- Features can be canceled
P-Camp 2008

12. Automation (still in progress)
• Cascaded close
- Requirement closure triggers close-deliver of linked PSs, features
- PS closure triggers close-deliver of linked ERs
• Notifications
- Email back to support on ER close
P-Camp 2008

13. Link types
• Most klugey part of the implementation
• No way to limit what issue types can link to what other issue types
P-Camp 2008

14. Accelerators
• Example: Deliver ER
- Closes with resolution of Delivered
• Complex accelerators still in progress
- “Create and link problem statement”
‣ Clones the current ER as a PS, sets ER status to scoped, leaves PS open for
editing, links ER to new PS
P-Camp 2008

15. Custom “PRD“ report
• Problem statements and all linked inputs, requirements and
features
- Filterable by text search, PS weight, timeframe, component (scrum), other
criteria
• Internal working report of market needs
- Used in product steering meetings to determine priorities for scrum
assignments and goals
- Used in sprint planning meetings to define burndown lists
- Always up-to-date with the latest list of customers having each problem!
P-Camp 2008

16. Custom roadmap report
• Features and all linked problem statements and requirements
- Organized by planned release / target timeframe
- Filterable by public/private, priority, planned release, timeframe, status, other
criteria
• XML format gets converted to Splunk’s public roadmap
P-Camp 2008

17. Roadmap
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18. PRD
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19. PRD (cont)
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20. Enhancement Request
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21. Problem Statement
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22. Problem Statement (cont)
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23. Feature
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24. Future goals
• Tighter CRM integration, especially opportunity value
• Continuously updated planned release for every ER based on
requirements
• More automation of problem priorities
• Support portal self-service visibility through to requirements
status
• Drilldown from public roadmap
• Automated creation of product marketing requirements
P-Camp 2008

25. How can you do it?
• We’re open sourcing our work
- ETA 1-2 months
- Delivery as empty project + plugin JARs
• Engage New Aspects of Software
- dpickering@newaspects.com
- Jira and Confluence experts
- They did the work for us and are in the best position to tweak it for you
P-Camp 2008