In our post on Product Owner, we discussed, how some of the most effective product owners have deep knowledge of the market, connect with the customers and can structure as well as prioritize requirements for the development team. In addition, they have great facilitation skills to set up environment where collaboration is fostered and utilized for competitive advantage resulting in sustainable delivery of high quality software.

We have been working with one such product owner. Sean Devlin plays the role of product owner for Front Rush - he explains requirements with business and acceptance test perspective and ruthlessly simplifies and prioritizes them. And its partly because of him that despite no face to face communication, what so ever - the product has been built to great quality and tremendous success, and continues to be built with great quality and tremendous success. In this interview, Sean Devlin shares his experiences in being a product owner.

agilecollab :  What was the business case around Front Rush and how did initial idea come about?

Sean Devlin : Collegiate Athletics in the U.S. is big business.  College coaches are under huge amounts of pressure to perform successfully because of the correlation between athletic success and alumni giving rates, total applicants, and national recognition which in turn supports the universities’ academic initiatives.  The first step in building a successful program is recruiting high school athletes to play for the respective university and with this comes a huge burden of storing large amounts of data for each recruit.  Coaches need to track, not just the contact information but also the number of times they communicated, visited, and evaluated each athlete.  A single coach can track anywhere from 50 to 12,000 recruits in a single year and prior to Front Rush, this was mostly done through hard copies and archaic databases not built specifically for recruiting and certainly not suitable.  In addition to storing data, coaches also need to be able to communicate with their athletes the same way athletes communicate with each other.  The old model of sending a letter and a follow up call has become obsolete in a society built on real-time communication.  The coaches recruiting model is nearly identical to the sales model used in big business today except replacing ’sales leads’ with ‘recruits’.  Front Rush simply applied the CRM technology pervasive in the business space and tailored it to collegiate athletics.  The focus is on usability so that coaches of all ages and technological backgrounds or lack there of can benefit from the application. The co-founder of Front Rush, Brad Downs, played collegiate baseball, and while being closely affiliated with the coaching staff saw first hand the inadequacies of the current hard copy/excel driven model of recruiting.  He had contacted me because of my background in the technology sector and together we developed ideas for Front Rush based on current CRM Systems, new technologies and scalable processes that would simplify a coach’s day to day.

agilecollab : Why did you select Net Solutions as your development partner?

Sean Devlin : During the dot-com boom, I had two high school colleagues who were using an outsourcing partner in India to develop web-sites for state-side clients.  For a brief period of time, I had done research on potential outsourcing partners which is where I first came across Net Solutions.  I later started a company, esman productions, which focused on organic marketing campaigns through college students and used Net Solutions’ services to develop our flash website.  Spin the big hand on a clock a few years and we needed a partner for development with Front Rush.  I contacted Net Solutions first because of the history with esman productions.  I also contacted other firms world wide.  We made the decision to work with Net Solutions because of their immediate understanding of our needs and the quality of product we could expect.

agilecollab : As a Product Owner what were the challenges in constructing requirements and getting market feedback?

Sean Devlin :  Getting market feedback is easy for us.  We have a perpetual dialog with our end-users about the speed, performance, usability and functionality of Front Rush.  Coaches know how they want Front Rush to work for them, and we work very hard to make this happen without diluting the core focus of the product.

agilecollab : In this light, how your overall experience been in working with Net Solutions?

Sean Devlin : At Front Rush, we expect only the best.  That is why we work with Net Solutions.

agilecollab : What were your original concerns in going with Net Solutions? How do you think we fared in this regard?

Sean Devlin : Our initial concern was whether or not the needs of a non-tech savvy coach would translate and scale in our CRM-type application.  This concern only lasted until we built the first mock-up of Front Rush and realized immediately that anybody would be able to use Front Rush regardless of their tech knowledge.

agilecollab : You have worked on both a fixed price and an hourly queue model. We know both were Agile in nature. Which one you liked more and why?

Sean Devlin : A fixed price model was sufficient for getting Front Rush off the ground and into a working application.  However, because of the growing needs of coaches, we have had to evolve our development model in order to be completely Agile.  Having a dedicated team makes it much easier to abide by SCRUM rules which results in more productive, effective development.  SCRUM allows us to develop in the moment and take projects in different directions as we see necessary.

agilecollab : What were some of the things you would recommend for a great development team - remote product owner participation?

Sean Devlin : I would recommend getting the best talent that you can find and set up an environment that will allow you and your team to be as light and quick as possible.  Make certain that there are no communication barriers and always err toward simplicity.

agilecollab : What sort of tools you use at your end to manage requirements, weight their priority or do you keep it simple?

Sean Devlin : From a development perspective, we do in fact have the giant white board with every recommendation, and every idea, every bug, and every concern that our end-users express to us.  The reality is that we rarely reference it.  We work very hard to engage our customers in open dialog so that we can understand their needs in and out — the white board is really just a formality. From a communication perspective, we are moving exclusively to 37 Signals’ Campfire. Its a great medium to collaborate with your team, share projects, files and then reference later on.

agilecollab : Finally, what are future plans for Front Rush?

Sean Devlin : Front Rush just released an application for Coaches to manage their camps which is a simple spin off of the current Front Rush application except with an e-commerce component for campers to pay online.  This is a major step in building an environment, through our applications, that will give coaches all of the tools necessary to spend as little time in the office and more time out on the field winning games!

Popularity: 18%

Posted on March 13th, 2008 by admin
Filed under: Case Studies, Interviews, Outsourcing 2.0 | No Comments »

Sean Devlin, contacted Net Solutions in 1997 to build a flash website. After that, he joined Monster.com and worked on some cutting edge features for them. After almost a decade Net Solutions heard from Sean again. Sean had partnered Brad Downs to work on a revolutionary online product, which has subsequently rewritten how universities across United States manage their sport athletes, recruits, alumni and events. The product is Frontrush. The success story continues with many records broken and accolades earned. Net Solutions, a part of this phenomenon right from the inception, is proud to be the development outsourcing partner for the premier University Sports Management System.

The project started as fixed price project in early 2006. During the pre-sales stage itself, we did some rapid screen mock ups and quickly went to development. Manoj Kalra, who had joined Net Solutions a few months back was the lead developer for the project. The project was developed much ahead of schedule and we were discussing Phase II of the project in May 2006 itself. While the first phase of the project was mostly about creating basic functionality for coaches and assistant coaches to manage recruits, rosters, notes and duties - the phase II added the calendar for events/ duties/ notes as well as stronger administrative control. Like Phase I, Phase II was also completed ahead of schedule and in late 2006, we were already to Phase III. Phase III focused on personalization of each coaches area with custom form fields, stronger search features and interactive AJAX features. As Phase III was being developed, the product was under extensive testing and demo at target universities and through some coaches. It was also the time when the first sales were made. Up till Phase III, we had worked on a fixed price approach. We quoted for each Phase, delivered a project plan and delivered much earlier. This was in large part due to an effective product owner role played by Sean. Sean made himself available at India times, almost every time we needed him to be available. He gave feedback quickly, helped us work in short weekly cycles, maintained a very clear prioritized requirements roster based on approved features for each phase and keep our focus on particular week’s deliverables. All the three releases [I, II and III] were delivered without any priority 1 or 2 bugs and much ahead of schedule. The application was beginning to take shape.

It was roughly around a year since Net Solutions and Frontrush had been working together. Also, the product was now in the market. The changes, customizations and support requests for each university were different than others. In addition, strategic liaisons with third party products like email template makers were being explored. At this stage, Net Solutions introduced the idea of abandoning Phase wise approach and working with a requirement roster for only few weeks. Sean agreed to try out the idea. Sean agreed to the idea and discussed the same with Brad as well, who seemed excited about the idea. Net Solutions history of good deliveries and retaining the same team only helped make the decision easier. While coming to Phase III, we had already demolished the hierarchical structure of project management from the project altogether and Manoj was the primary contact for the project for Sean. Going forward, Manoj was primary contact for Sean with a Business Analyst helping Sean define requirements/ acceptance test criteria as needed. The first test of this engagement was a delivery 6 sprints later. A lot of functionality - search, performance, usability and also a critical email template integration for emails being sent from Frontrush by various coaches was being deployed. And we were able to do this on time. After this, the team really took off. Sean and Manoj were on MSN almost daily discussing priorities, checking features and making each sprint a success. The whole of 2007 saw Sean and Brad travel across United States and add one prestigious client after another. The development team in India supported them through quick turn around of demo requests, feature integrations with existing university websites as well as customizing any parts of Frontrush as needed. In late 2007, the team grew even more as we worked on releasing yet another Frontrush product - Camper : a solution on the lines of Frontrush, but targeted at recruit screening camps. The team once again pulled off the product and integration in less than 03 months. In the meanwhile as Frontrush continued to grow, we also worked on support, performance tuning and upgrades.

Frontrush has been a delightful journey for all involved. Net Solutions holds Frontrush as one of its premier projects and is working with FR team in US to now increase the market lead even further.

Popularity: 10%

Posted on March 11th, 2008 by admin
Filed under: Case Studies, Collaboration | No Comments »