All posts by pherwarth

Three Pillars of Successful Product Innovation

At //SEIBERT/MEDIA, we’ve been developing and creating software for years. During this time, we’ve discovered some basic elements that are vital to building products that gain wider marketplace acceptance and are, ideally, exciting.

When I hear about dissatisfied customers or projects that failed, it’s usually because we’ve neglected to consider at least one of the following “three pillars of successful product innovation.” I now regard them as essential to our success as a product provider.

RheinMainJS Meetup on 26 January 2017 at //SEIBERT/MEDIA in Wiesbaden

RheinMainJS

The JavaScript User Group Wiesbaden und Mainz (in German) has their twelfth meeting on the 26 January 2017, and we are hosting them at //SEIBERT/MEDIA. RheinMainJS is a user group focusing on JavaScript and related areas such as mobile development. It is open to everyone who is interested in technology and you are invited to attend the bi-monthly meetings free of charge.

Hackathon at //SEIBERT/MEDIA – Field report on developing the EasyEvents plugin for Confluence

The goal of a hackathon is to buckle down and create a product and/or complete a small project under time pressure (at //SEIBERT/MEDIA within 24 hours). The hackathon team alone plans and decides what kind of product or project to work on. We explained the reasons for regularly conducting hackathons in our agile organization in more detailed articles. On the one hand, we strive to create concrete and truly innovative solutions. On the other hand, we try to attain “soft” effects, such as promoting training, teamwork and personal responsibility and motivating our employees. Our latest hackathon took place in early July 2013. In the following chronological field report, we offer insight into the work of the team that designed and developed the EasyEvents Confluence plugin.

Why we transfer requirements lists into a backlog with user stories

We are often contacted by customers with very rough, technical requirements lists for software projects. In cases like this, the first project step for //SEIBERT/MEDIA is to turn the customer’s requirements list into a product backlog that highlights how the customer benefits from the requirements. This is not a trivial task and requires time and resources. But why should the customer pay for this preparation work that has nothing to do with actually completing the project?

Agile organization at //SEIBERT/MEDIA – from brainstorming to realization

We’ve been using the agile framework Scrum to complete software development projects for almost four years now. Many Scrum elements also form the basis of our process model for continuously improving our organization. The internal label for our process is “Agile Org”. In one-month cycles, we think about things we want to change and work on them. The topics vary greatly from improving company strategy and forming more intensive customer relationships to internal issues like creating a good work-life balance.