For the third year in a row, MobileIron is in the leader quadrant. I don’t have the rights to share the report here, but what is interesting about this year’s leaders quadrant is that there is a clear separation between the three top leaders in the market and the rest of the pack. This basically defines the shortlist for enterprise mobility for the foreseeable future.

While the visual diagram is important, I do encourage customers and prospects to read the report carefully and look at the Strengths and Cautions sections as they are very insightful.

This report positions MobileIron as a clear leader in this market not just from a technology perspective but also from the ability to execute and create a profitable and sustainable business around our solutions and products. This is important for both the company and our customers because they want a viable long term partner to help them with their journey to become Mobile First organizations.

The report is available for download from the MobileIron website right now.

Vittorio

In this article I will drill down in how we are handle the general and sprint backlogs.

Overall Backlog

We use the uber-backlog to stick everything we know we need to do at some point in the future. We use Epics for big or fuzzy thing like “Develop a New Website”, “Launch product XYZ” etc. but we also use the backlog for smaller things like “write script for new video blog”, “add picture to product XYB web page” etc.

Here is a screen shot of the backlog

On the left, we have the epics in order of priority for the current sprint with the marketing themes at the very top. This helps us break down the bigs thing too do into smaller stories in order of priority.

To the right, we have the stories committed in the sprint with the relative points. As a reminder and reference, each point is 1/2 day of work. Jira does a good job at allowing us to tag stories by the epics they belong to and visually see if we are allocating our effort according to the stated priorities.

Personally, I use the uber-backlog to stick things that come up during my 101s with my boss and other internal and external meetings so that I don’t forget about them.

Managing the backlog

We use Jira as our Scum tool. As I said before, we could use a spreadsheet just a well, but Jira gives us few things that are very convenient and useful such as:

• The Burn Down Chart (see below)
• The work view that allows each member of the team to focus on the stories at hand (see below)
• Ways to size stories, assign them to people, tag them by Epic so that we know which stories contribute to getting something big done over time

Sprint Backlog

The general backlog is typically not well prioritized until I (the product owner) sit down with the scrum master the Friday before the beginning of a sprint and go through it and define the priorities for the next sprint by looking at:

• current sprint leftovers
  • Not everything that is not getting done in the current sprint is automatically moved to the next. It is the whole notion of scrum. If it is good enough and you shipped it, leave it alone. Plus if you do this right, the stuff that does not get done was the less important anyway.
• existing backlog items
  • Here is where I look at existing epics and stories in the backlog looking for those who should become a priority in the next sprint. If I feel like the epic is too big for a single sprint (e.g. create a new website), I break it down into something I think it is small enough that the team can get it done, e.g. design and create the product section of the new website). I also look at my own stories to see what’s important for me to get done in the next sprint. The scrum master also pings the team for things we should consider for the next sprint
• potential new things
  • I sometimes create new epics and stories based on what I learned in the last sprint and what came up at the executive level or board meetings.

Once the priorities of the sprint are defined on Friday, the scrum master sends out an email to the scrum team to give them headsup on what’s coming in the next sprint so that they can

• start collecting their thoughts for the sprint planning meeting
• call out missing priorities

Backlog and Sprint Planning

During the 2-4 hour sprint planning, we take the top priorities which are typically expressed in terms of epics “Start new nurturing campaign”, “Launch product briefings” etc, and we break them down as a team until each of us knows what we need to do during the sprint to get each epic done. In other words, we don’t move to the next entry in the list of things we want to achieve in the sprint, until the one at hand is fully understood and stories have been entered in the sprint backlog of the team members who are contributing to it.

This is a time consuming exercise that achieve a number good things:

• Communication – everybody in the team reaches a pretty intimate understanding of we are signing up to do
• Transparency – we all know what we sign up to do and most importantly what we are singing up to do fo the team.
• Dependencies Identification – by breaking things down we identify dependencies within and out side the team so that we can be proactive about addressing and sequencing them
• Meeting Time Saving – by spending a lot of time having meaningful discussions about what we need to do in the sprint, we minimize the number of additional meetings we need to have in the coming 2 weeks

We stop going down the list when as a team we reach our sprint capacity (# of team members * 10 working days * 2 points per day). Each of us keeps some points reserved in the sprint backlog do do things that are not necessarily help the sprint (like a business trip ro customer visits).

At this point we start the sprint and people start working on their backlog.

Working the Backlog

Jira has a nice view for each member of the team to work on their backlog during the sprint. Here is an example from my backlog:

The left column has the list of committed stories still to be worked on, the middle contains the ones I am currently working on and the right most one the stories that have been completed.

It is very convenient to stay focused on the most important things in the sprint and see at a glance how well I am doing toward completing my commitments to the team.

Backlog Tracking

Jira does a good job at tracking and displaying the burn-down chart which is proudly displayed on a big screen by the marketing bullpen. It typically looks like this:

I don’t stress about having the team close their stories as soon as they are done with them. I guess people get to update their closure in the second week.

The scrum master keep track of how accurate we are about sizing our efforts sprint over sprint. Some people confuse this with micro-management. It is not. It is about predictability and becoming better and better (realistic?) about what we can get doen in a 2 week sprint.

As you can see, we started by overcommitting pretty badly but we got better overtime and we are stabilizing around 75%-80% completion which is pretty good.

In a future post, I will cover in more details how we do the sprint review.

Let me know what you think and how you are using scrum to run things other that software development.

Ciao

Vittorio

Yes, we are hiring. I am looking for candidates for product marketing in my team at MobileIron and I want you to contact me if you:

• want to work in a hyper fast growing company that is relevant in Silicon Valley and in the market
• want to help defining the future of mobility
• rather do than pontificate
• are addicted to shipping
• like pragmatism over perfectionism
• Are obsessed with creating compelling and relevant content for your prospects and customers
• Are tired with old and proven marketing tactics
• Value impact over title
• work hard, play hard

but most importantly, if you:

• Care and kick butt
• like to work at a company that is relevant, growing, with an amazing engineering team that keeps innovating and changing the world

Contact me!!   

Don’t send me your resume. Just tell me what you have done, with whom you have done it and how you delighted your customers. I will tell whether you are going to be my idol from the first sentence out of your mouth/email

Nice written boring resumes will be ignored. I can find you on LinkedIn if I need to.

Your education is important only if you have a track record of putting it to good use.

I am a demanding boss who you will love to work for and I will stay out of your way. We run fast and use Scrum to run marketing with complete transparency and communication. We are here to change the world, not to step on each other.

And yes, I will bake for you, often

If you want to see the job description click here.

Vittorio

Mobile IT DNA Critical Mass

We have engineers here that have been writing production level code to manage apps, data and devices across all mobile operation systems for years. We have plenty of patents in this area and Mobile IT technology firsts like enterprise app store and selective device wiping as well as almost 5000 customers to prove it. It was clear to me since the first day I joined that this company has the right DNA to innovate and succeed in this space. Mobile IT is redefining the modern IT stack and if history repeats itself, it is always one or two pure players that propels a new market and MobileIron is well positioned to be it for Enterprise Mobility Management. We have critical mass in both Mobile IT DNA and customers success.

MDM, MAM, MCM and EMM

While MDM (Mobile Device management) started it all and it is still growing very fast, the market is evolving towards MCM (Mobile Content Management) and (MAM) Mobile Application Management which combined are being referred as EMM (Enterprise Mobility Management), man what a acronym soup… There seems to be a rush to the app management gold these days from many vendors. Reality is, that customers need a combination of these different technologies to solve different but intertwined problems that require an integrated platform solution. Mobile IT is a platform, not a point solution.

We have been way down this path at MobileIron. We invented the notion of an Enterprise Mobile App Store back in 2010 and since then we never stopped innovating in this area, and with the release of AppConnect and AppTunnel in 2012 we now have a very complete Mobile Application Management suite that covers the entire mobile application lifecycle.

Last week, our engineers gave us a sneak peak of some new advanced technology in this area that for the time being we are calling AppReflect that moves the bar once again for Mobile Application Management.

You can see the video here

Stay tuned for more information as we get closer to the product availability date.

Our MAM solution combined with  Docs@work (our  MCM) and Web@work build up our complete Mobile IT platform and we are very pleased to see the adoption of the higher level components of our platform in both our installed base and new customers.

Competition

Right now there are around 20-30 players competing in this market according to Gartner’s last year MDM Magic Quadrant but what we see in out there in competitive deals is really 2, maybe 3 vendors besides us.

According to IDC growth and market share numbers, MobileIron has emerged as the premium product amongsts the pure players with our closest competitor being very aggressive with their pricing tactics to try to gain market shares and the bigger guys bundling their nacent mobile solutions with their existing legacy products. Dynamics that have all been seen in other markets.

We are very focussed on both building innovative products AND and building a long term profitable business, both of which are great for our customers, not just us.

Somethings Stay the Same

While everything about mobile IT is different, somethings are still (will be) the same, especially for me, specifically that fact that I will compete again against Citrix who acquired ZenPrise last year. We don’t see them too often in competitive deals today, but given their channel reach and presence in IT with their legacy product, I am sure we will see them more and more out there.  It will feel familiar to me

Vittorio

The other night it struck me that there is a very strong similarity between what the judges do on these shows and what many of us who have management and hiring responsibilities do every day on the job.

We judge people all the time. During the interview, meeting with partners and customers, performance reviews… the list goes on.

Once a candidate is part of the team, we also coach them to help them grow and sometimes, vote them off the team.

People working for Venture Capitalist firms probably go through this 5 times a day…

If you watch The Voice, you have probably seen this scene a few times, where a contestant sings the first line of the song and all the coaches press the button and turn around and fight to have them on their team. Then they go “You just got it“, “You were born to sing“, “You either have it or you don’t, and you got it” and so on.

This is exactly how I feel when I meet a true butt kicker, a passionate entrepreneur, a high-tech superstar, the one that is 10 times better than the second best.

They open their mouth and you know it.

For example, that’s exactly how I felt when I met Carl Sjogreen in 1998 when he was working on the exit of his second company at age 21. He is now at co. number 4 after an amazing career at BEA, Google and Facebook.

Or Chris York, Stanford Psychology graduate turned product manager, turned exquisite designer, turned entrepreneur…

And Noah Wasmer with whom I am working now at MobileIron. I have been lucky to meet and work with a few gifted ones, the list in not long, by definition.

Sometimes I hear people saying “how do people like that do it over and over again, why can’t that be me?“

Well, just like with singing, you either got it or you don’t. The environment helps, I mean of all places being in Silicon Valley definitely increases the opportunity to blossom and connect with other great people, but the pyramid of great people who create innovation and great companies is extremely thin at the top, just like with great artists.

And just like with singing, talent alone is not enough. These successful entrepreneurs work hard, really hard. They are animals.

So, what if you are not one of those? Well, try to find one and work really, really hard to add value to them and their teams…

How do you get on their teams? Oh right… there still is that audition thingie to pass. My advice? Choose the right song, know who you are and what your talent is, and show it.

Try not to be pitchy or karaokey, be you. Kick butt.

Vittorio

In this post I will cover why we are doding it and how we instantiated the Scrum process in our working environment. In subsequent posts, I will drill down in each area and provide more details.

Scrum for Marketing???

While most people associate Scrum to software development, Scrum is actually a project management methodology designed to break complex initiatives into manageable chunks, iterate, ship and learn.  In other words, if a very pragmatic way to get things done.

Why Scrum?

I used Scrum to develop software in the past, and I am not just talking about standing up every day to go around the team to share what each of us did. I am talking about a full team transformation with external coaching, executive sponsorship, culture, tools… the whole nine yards. I would argue that when people make this transformation successfully once, they will never go back to waterfall, not for innovative products that by definition face lot’s of unknowns. What I love about it is the sense of team members empowerment, constant communication, pragmatism, energy and a built in urgency of getting things done. Always be shipping!!

The Unknowns of Marketing

At MobileIron we are growing really fast. When I joined the marketing team, the majority of us had been with the company less than 3 months. There were a lot of unknowns about the market, processes (or lack of them), metrics, and each other. Making quarterly plans in such an environment makes no sense. Things change too fast, we learn too many new things all the time. Scrum seemed to me like a great way to force myself to dive into the details, foster constant communication and give us an opportunity to adjust every two weeks and use the learning in the next sprint.

Don’t get me wrong, we still do annual and quarterly goals, but we use scrum to break them down into digestible chunks, ship, learn and adjust.

Applying Scrum to Marketing

Sprint Length

We started with weekly sprints, then quickly moved to a 2 week sprint because the overhead of the sprint review and planning was too big on a 7 day sprint. Two weeks now feel just right, short enough to adjust and and be nimble, but long enough that the process overhead does not get in the way.

Team Roles

Product Owner

I am the product owner and I prioritize the items in the backlog. Everybody can put things in the backlog, but only I set the priority every sprint. I am also a team member and I do commit to get stories and points done in each sprint. 

We have a part time scrum master that also manages our social media program.  She does all the things that you expect a scrum master to do, in summary she manages the lightweight scrum process: the backlog, sprint review and planning meeting agenda, daily meetings, obstacle identification and so on. She also manages our budget which comes handy in many conversations. Initially I gave her a crush course on Scrum, everything else she learned on the job.

Team Members

The rest of the team members are all my direct reports. It is 9 people total. The rest of the team is invited to sprint reviews, but are not part of the sprint planning and daily stand-up meetings

Backlog

The backlog contains a bunch of Epics that describe the big things we need to get done in marketing such as “deploy new web site”, “Organize 2013 Sales Kick Off”, “2013 user conference”, “Lead Flow Optimization” and so on, plus a number of smaller stories that are either leftovers from previous sprints or smaller things we need to do. I take input for the backlog from the xTeam on a weekly basis and other stakeholder like our CEO in my 101 with them. At the end of each sprint, the scrum master polls the team for epic sand stories that should make it into the backlog for the next sprint.

Click here for a post where I cover backlog management in more details.

Sprint Backlog

At the end of each sprint, I get together with the scrum master and prioritize the backlog for the next sprint. I don’t necessarily break down each epic into stories as by  the Scrum book, but we don’t leave the sprint planning until we indeed break everything down to stories that we can get done in 1 or 2 days

We assign a point to each 1/2 working day, so each member of the team has 20 points per sprint. We try to share and work on stories that have relevance to the team or cross functional dependencies. Moreover, each of us reserve some points in our personal backlog to manage daily interruptions and things we need to take care on our own (like a business trip, managing emails etc).

Sprint Reviews and Planning

We stat the sprint with a 90 minutes review of the previous sprint. Stakeholders are all invited (especially one of our main ones who is the head of sales) as well as all members of the marketing team. We start by going through all main marketing metrics (leads, opportunities  etc) and map them against our quarterly goals to see if we are on track, then we share and discuss all main deliverables and achievements from the sprint that just ended.

Then we go in planning mode for 2-3 hours. The scrum master puts up the prioritize backlog. We start from the top and I let team members ask me questions about each element until they are in a position to enter stories in their sprint backlog that are between 1 and 4 points each (1/2 day to two days). We never tackle things that we cannot finish in the sprint.

We have been around 75-80% backlog completion for the 12 sprint we have done so far, which is not bad. We go better over time, which means we are learning what is our velocity, that is our ability to get stuff done in 2 weeks.

We don’t automatically move stories that were not completed into the next sprint. Only if they are still a priority.

After the review is over, I send our the sprint review presentation that includes our marketing dashboard to all stakeholders.

Daily Standup

I left the daily stand up and Scrum tool topics for last because these are the things Scrum newbies obsessed about the most, and they are NOT that important.

We do the daily standup meeting at noon everyday but the day we plan the sprint. It is quick and painless as it should be. It is about communication and obstacle identification. We don’t rat hole.

Tool

We use Jira as our scrum too. We could probably get away with an excel spreadsheet, but Jira has two very convenient features that make us more productive:

1. It produces the burn down chart that we prominently display  on a big monitor in the marketing bullpen
2. It has a very convenient screen that team members use during the sprint to visually see what is in their backlogg for the sprint, what they are working on and what got done already. It helps to visually see where we are and focus on what’s at stack that day.

Is it working?

As far as I am concerned it is working great. We communicate constantly, we have incredible transparency within the team and from outside our team, there is a sense of urgency and accomplishment that is renewed at each sprint, we minimize the time we spend in meetings during the week by maximizing the quality time we spend together during the planning meeting to really understand what we are trying to get done and what are the inter-dependencies.

Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions on this topic. In subsequent posts I will drill down in each of the areas of Scrum above and talk about how we do it and the lessons that we are learning in applying the process to marketing.

Ciao

Vittorio

This is how it feels:

My absence is not for lack of things to share, the opposite is true. The challenge has been to carve out the time from the fast pace of learning mode I am in to share the lessons on this blog.

Here are the main area of learning thus far:

The Mobile Market is Moving Incredibly fast

Everybody knows that the rate of adoption, innovation and change in the mobile world we live in is unprecedented. This is challenging everybody, from IT departments on the customer side to traditional and new players on the vendor side. The Mobile Revolution is reshaping the IT stack and  the software market as we know it.

Mobile IT from within is Very Different

I looked into the mobile market, its trend and customer requirements in my previous job as we were extending our product line to add Mobile management capabilities. I have to say that looking at it from within the Mobile tornado working for a Mobile Pure Player perspective is a different world.  I am surrounded by colleagues with pure mobile DNA who have the scars of working in mobile IT since 2007. Heck, they invented some of the major Mobile innovations in this space like selected wiping and Mobile Enterprise App store. Moreover, we now have nearly 5000 customers using our platform who are helping us learn what’s needed today and more importantly in the future. I am definitely thrilled I made the transition to a mobile pure player.

I love Running Marketing  (more than I thought I would)

When I was on the product development and product marketing side, I used to whine about marketing things such as the web site, company brand, advertisement, leads and so on… Funny how this happens, I am know responsible with my team for all these things and I have to make them work and I am loving it!  I am learning a ton in the process and I developed a big appreciation for how hard it and rewarding it is.

The first thing we tackled was how to tell the company vision in a way that is compelling for our customers and easy to tell for our field and channel. A lot of the deliverables are internally focused (sales and partner training, company presentation etc) but you can get a peak at the story in this video.

and in the product section of our legacy web site. A new website is coming soon.

Scrum Rules (yup, I use scrum to run marketing)

In my last few gigs on the product development side of things, I fully adopted agile development. Not just doing the daily stand up meeting (which many people associate with doing agile…), but fully embracing a development methodology based on quick iterations, code over specs, pragmatism, personal accountability and full transparency.

On my second week on the job, I trained my marketing team on Scrum and we started using this methodology to run marketing and get things done. We have not looked back.

Our customers are our field, partners and channel, the product is fundamentally the company story and the metrics around it (leads, revenues and so on) and we do iteration of 2 weeks. I will blog extensively about this as I don’t believe many companies do this and I am now convinced they should   Click here to learn more.

I am glad to be back blogging and this post will serve as a table of content for the upcoming articles.

Ciao

Vittorio

I will miss the adrenaline rush of helping prepare the VMworld EUC keynote and then see Steve deliver it to 20,000 people…   always a big success as he is consumate presenter who never misses a bit on stage thanks to his vast knowledge of VMware technology and how customers use it.  Plus, he is a drinker of fine espresso

Here are some memories of us on stage together. Starting from the most fun, singing TNT live while opening for INXS in 2010

The demo at Vmworld 2011

and our last one together at Vmworld 2012

I will miss being on stage with him!

I know he will be very successful with his new adventure and I hope to be working together again someday.

Vittorio

In the first 8 quarters since shipping, the iPad sold 3 times more units than the iPhone.

Beside the speed at which this is happening, the scale is unprecedented. Here is how many Android devices are activated each day…

…north of a 1.2 million units!!!!

While iOS is the primary mobile platform in the enterprise, all these Android devices are making their way into the corporate world as well, without mentioning the recently launched Windows 8…

A major management and security headache for IT

This journey is going to be fast and furious

Vittorio

I am a lucky man!!! Since I started my own software company back in italy, I have had the chance to work in some of the best companies in their respective fields. From the acquisition of my startup by Object Design, the pioneer in object and XML databases, to BEA, the  leader of Java application platforms, to Oracle and for the last 4 years,VMware.

The experience at VMware has been fantastic and has given me the opportunity to work on two of the most impactful projects of my career: the Virtualization Journey and the End User Computing Vision and product line. I am truly grateful for this.

The Virtualization Journey Lives On

The Virtualization Journey still lives on and I believe it is the most pragmatic and prescriptive way to move IT from the past of physical servers to modern cloud computing.

The journey is built on the experience of dozens of real customers and that’s why it has been so successful within VMware customers and the industry at large. Working on the journey really helped cement in me how powerful it is to listen carefully to customers, learn, then share the lessons with other customers and prospects, something we often talk about in this industry, but not often do.

VMware EUC vision and VMware View

When I moved into the VMware R&D organization from Marketing in 2010, I worked on VMware View and then on the EUC vision.

VMware View rocks!!! Without disclosing confidential information, I can tell you that as I transition out of the team, VMware View was growing 3-4 times faster than the competition until Q2 early this year. In the most recent quarter Citrix enterprise desktop revenue shrank 1% Y/Y while view kept growing very nicely. A testament to a great product that clearly continues to gain market shares and a great team that is not afraid to compete with a whole company which is solely focussed on the Desktop market (to my Citrix friends, I know you are reading, I have the feeling you have not seen the last of me

A great ride and great fun (yes, including dancing on Citrix’ campus the day we shipped View 5.0)

After accelerating  View momentum in the market place, we worked on giving the End User Computing Team a bigger vision which we unveiled at VMworld 2011 which resulted in the Alpha version of the platform being showcased at VMworld 2012.

I still believe in the  vision of an integrated management platform to manage the post-PC era across legacy windows desktops and mobile devices.

But in any major industry transformation like the mobile revolution we are living in these days, one or two pure plays always emerge as successful independent companies, which takes me to what’s new for me…

What’s Next?

Last week I left VMware and joined MobileIron as VP of Marketing. MobileIron is the leader in security and management for mobile apps, documents, and devices.

I decided that after spending almost my entire career working on the “new thing” within big companies, it was time for me to try the pure play route. Moreover, I have been in the valley for more than 10 years and I still have not given the startup dream a real chance.

So here I am on a new journey. Lots to do and lots to learn. I will keep this blog alive under a new domain (mobilityjourney.com) and will focus the content more on the mobile industry. My new twitter account is

MobilityJourney

Thank you VMware, it has been a great ride and you have been very good to me.

MobileIron, I am excited about the future here. Let’s kick some butt.

Vittorio