Tag: Book Review

Product Roadmaps – Book Review

Featured by xavierfigueras, posted in Game Production

Here you can find attached my learnings from ‘Product Roadmaps Relaunched – How to set direction while embracing uncertainty’.

What is the book about

Written by:

A good product roadmap is one of the most important documents of the organization, as it helps align stakeholders around product goals, giving a visual representation of a strategy. ‘Product Roadmaps’ comes to provide a detailed summary considering all aspects to be considered when designing one.

This is a book mainly addressed to product managers, but also useful for other roles who need to take care of the roadmap in order to communicate and manage expectations.

wHAT i LIKED ABOUT THE BOOK

  • It consistently works on the mindset behind product roadmaps. Stating clearly that a roadmap is not a project plan. Plus it goes to the why, talking about the importance of aligning it with the company’s vision and mission. The book explains how the themes and subthemes of our roadmap need to relate to the objectives that will in the end push toward that product vision.
  • The holistic approach when defining the contents of the book makes it a very well-rounded book. Plus it makes it easy to collect ideas fast with minimal effort. You can perfectly skip some pages and still get a lot of value out of it. Its combination of tools with ‘light theory’ provides a healthy balance that makes this book compatible with experimented experts and also beginners in the product management world.
  • The format is extremely friendly. It clearly aims to cover many user cases so that you can get the answers that you are looking for, and it makes it with images, charts, tables, etc. It makes the book very clear and easy to read.

What I disliked about the book

  • Although I understand that the product roadmap is quite a broad topic by itself, the way the contents are distributed around the book feels quite random. It would be nice if the authors had found some way to make it a bit more sequential. For instance, chapter 3 ‘gathering inputs’ could have been followed by chapter 8 ‘achieving alignment and buy-in’, and later on chapter 7 ‘prioritizing with science’.
  • At some point, I believe this book is not pragmatic enough when not mentioning at all engineering or the actual development teams, who are the ones responsible for making a technical assessment and setting expectations in the first place. I would have appreciated greater clarity on how all parts contribute to the roadmap rather than focusing on the product side only.

Summary and rating

This book handled multiple aspects of the roadmap in a very detailed manner, covering delicate topics and considering the different stages from ideation to the actual roadmap plotting. Clearly written and to the point, it’s a book that almost anyone can benefit from, however, I would have appreciated a better index and a natural involvement from the development side when defining a roadmap. If roadmaps are an interesting topic for you and your everyday life, I totally recommend this book.

Rating 4/5

Agile Game Development – Book Review

by xavierfigueras, posted in Game Production, Leadership

The Game Production subject I teach ‘Game Production’ at TecnoCampus as College Lecturer it’s based on a book called ‘Agile Game Development’. Here you can find my thoughts on it.

What is the book about?

The scope of the book it’s quite broad: starts sharing a historical perspective on how the game development has changed over time, explaining the impact agile had in the game industry and constantly relating to the experience of the author: Clinton Keith.

For those who are getting started into agile, ‘Agile game development’ offers a deep introduction to elemental agile related aspects such as the methodology (scrum, kanban and lean) and the product backlog, all of it in a gaming context.

Clinton Keith did not only stick to the basics in this book. He went above and beyond explaining how self-organized teams look like, how to scale agile, and gave an introduction to agile best practices such as extreme programming.

What I liked about the book

  • Undoubtedly the top takeaway from this book is the multiple examples it offers putting agile into the game context. Not only from a artefact perspective (user stories and roles) but also exposing usual production mistakes and how agile helps preventing them.
  • Its all-in-one approach it’s very adequate if you are getting started as producer. If you are experiencing ‘first time’ challenges, this book will most likely solve your questions.

What I disliked about the book

  • The book chapters are not synthetic enough. By trying to cover all possible ‘use cases’, it fails to communicate clearly the final message. I believe other books like ‘The Agile Samurai’ and ‘Agile Coaching’ can help you understand the exact same concepts in a much more concise and better structured way.
  • Not all chapters are treated with the same depth. I could not find the level of detail observed in scrum and user stories when going through the self-organized teams and scaled agile parts. This is a book that could have been easily divided into many, giving a more balanced level of detail.
  • Mixing concepts with examples of what not to do. Although I understand the good intention behind sharing personal experiences, at some point it turns out confusing and do not add value when those experiences relate to bad practices. I would have appreciated a ‘this is the theory’ and ‘this is how it’s done’ simpler approach.

Summary and rating

In spite of its complexity and lack of conciseness, it’s all-in-one approach and its multiple game related examples, make of this book a unique partner for anyone who wants to get started in any of the aspects related to agile game development. If you are already an experienced producer, I would recommend you to get specific books specialized on your topic of interest.

Rating 3/5