So many companies believe that they have to invest in multi-quarter, extremely expensive, projects in order to continue to provide value to their customers. Many customers just need a simple solution to their problems, but we are distracted by the need to have a "big bang" with every release. This is how smaller more nimble companies can skyrocket to success, why can't established companies do the same?

This interactive workshop (think teams, post its on the wall, and lots of ideation) will provide a step by step process that will help you efficiently travel from identifying your customer all the way to validation of a solution to a problem your customer is having.

It is expensive to have our teams work on projects that we don't know if our customers want. There has to be a better way to get from really big problem down to smaller solutions that lead us in the right path, without huge investment of our company's resources and without putting our company's reputation on the line. This process is what I call, finding the Minimum Viable Solution, the deliverable product that helps test your hypothesis and customer with as little risk and cost as possible.

I will teach one way to journey from a customer-focused problem statement to a defined and scoped solution definition.

By the end of the workshop, each team will have experience with:

• Identifying our customer - "Who"
• Defining a problem we want to solve for this customer - "Why"
• Describing the journey the customer will take through our solution (UI/Journey Map)
• Defining how we will enable the journey to happen (Story Map)
• Defining milestones and deliverables

How do you prioritize complete randomness from every angle against the work that is mission critical? How do you keep your developers engaged while slogging through the worst maintenance project they have ever seen, while also helping them work on their passion projects? How do you get the fun stuff done while you work on the opposite, all while having the most impact for the team, the business, and your customers?

As a product manager, it is important to be able to find ways through the craziness, the passion, and the demands in order to make sure you are working on the right things at the right time. In my career, I have been asked to balance wild ideas, an open source community, required work, developer burnout, all while keeping a product backlog moving forward properly. I will talk about how I bring order to chaos using a framework called RICE and how you can apply this to the simplest or the most intense backlog using real world situations. I will also talk about how I have modified this framework to fit the real world, you know with deadlines and things.