Open Stack

On 5 December 2014 at 09:35, Stefano Maffulli <stefano at openstack.org> wrote:

> >    - How do we gain acceptance from the wider community for this effort?
>
> What do you mean by 'wider community'?
>

People who aren't in the product working group. To the extent that we
attempt to effect change, then the rest of the community must be brought
along for the ride, otherwise no change will occur.


> >       - How do we find an effective mechanism for product management to
> >       occur?
> >
> > and no doubt there are more.
>
> Let's get this straight: Product Management is already occurring in
> OpenStack. We've been shipping a functioning product for years, so
> product management per se is not the problem. I think we need now, given
> the size of OpenStack, a better way to coordinate the various
> conflicting commercial interests happening inside the ecosystem.
>
>
This is true, but I feel that successful product management is
significantly more than shipping something that merely functions. As an
example:

The "Win The Enterprise" WG is essentially a product management effort
which you could position as resulting from lack of product management focus
on Enterprise earlier. Even that working group is really only functioning
at the smallest level: it's considering development tasks and knocking them
over. That's certainly necessary, but I don't think it's sufficient.

There are many other questions that need to be addressed if there is to be
a Win in the Enterprise that are not resolved by the addition of a
particular feature set. e.g: how are we going to make OpenStack supportable
enough for everyday enterprises to use? There are some larger questions
that the WTE WG is brushing lightly against with a couple of smallish use
cases, when perhaps what is needed is a significant change.


Big questions like this can be discussed at this level and perhaps
forwarded to the Board or TC if we find something really big and
intractable.

    The Product working group is made of managers, people, functions,
>     groups that own "products" based on OpenStack with the objective to
>     complete the circle of end users, operators, product owners,
>     developers.
>

This doesn't seem nearly enough to me. It doesn't say this group delivers
anything. We should at least be making motherhood statements about
improving the situation, or ideally making real statements about what we
want to get done here.

Stefano's points on coordination and prioritisation are the tactical part
of product management. It's the strategic part that concerns me: what are
we going to do to improve OpenStack as a product (which is a lot more than
shipping the latest release) in a changing environment?

I would go with something like:

The Product working group is made of managers, people, functions, groups
that own "products" based on OpenStack who aim to improve the quality of
the delivery process, the delivered product, and the product experience for
operators and end users. We do this by coordinating our actions, advocating
on behalf of our customers for improvements in all areas of the OpenStack
community's activity and continuously measuring our progress.


What we measure is an interesting question.

Roland