When I graduated from college with a degree in advertising and triumphantly announced that I was going to move to Boise, Idaho, I was met with many puzzled looks and bewildered responses. Common questions: “WHY would you move to such a small city ‘in the middle of nowhere’ right out of college?”, “I thought you were really passionate about advertising?”, ”Seriously!?”, “Do you have family there or something?”  

At Balihoo, many of my coworkers experienced similar reactions and comparable questions from friends and family; however, for most, the decision was made largely for the same reason: the amazing atmosphere and lifestyle that Boise provides (being able to enjoy outdoor sports of all varieties 365-days a year is pretty fantastic - as are the kind of people attracted to such a lifestyle)! National Geographic, CNN Money Magazine, Kiplinger, U.S. News & Report and MSNBC all agree.

Check out this quick video by the Idaho Department of Commerce (featuring our CEO, Pete Gombert and VP of Marketing, Shane Vaughan - plus some glimpses of our office):

This post, Customer Service and Your Bottom Line, can be read on our new blog by clicking this link.

A couple months ago the Tour de Coffee was launched. It was our mission to find the best coffee in downtown Boise. After six grueling weeks of judging, tasting, and scrutinizing, we have our winner! We patronized six local coffee shops, including: Thomas Hammer, Java, Alia’s, Dawson Taylor, Flying M, and Moxie Java.

This was a fairly scientific process. We had 12-16 attendees to each location and judged based on the following criteria:

• Taste – How does the coffee taste? Was it excellently roasted or did it taste like expired Taster’s Choice?
• Speed – How quickly was the shop able to serve all of us? Were we tapping our feet in anticipation or swiping our debit cards the same moment we walked through the door?
• Barista Friendliness – Was the service friendly and cheerful? In other words, did the barista’s have their morning coffee before serving ours?
• Food Options – Were food options aplenty/was enough food available? Did you feature 32 strains of biscotti or just one stale bran muffin?
• Price – Was the price right? Were we surprised we could pay with pocket change or did we have to borrow from the nearest D.L. Evans?
• Location – Were we satisfied with how far/close the particular coffee shop was? Were we too winded to order when we arrived or did we merely stroll across the street?

Overall results below:

Scorecards were given to each attendee, and the feedback was crunched and tortured until we arrived at the clear winner: ALIA’S!!!!!!!!!! Alia’s has the best coffee in town (at least in our humble opinion), and they also offer the tastiest bagel sandwiches around. Alia’s scored highly in nearly every category. The major concern that seemed to be a theme in voting was their ability to handle our bandwidth…

That said, Congratulations, Alia’s! Now be sure to staff for a flood of Balihooers every Friday!!!

This post, Balihoo Halloween 2009, can be read on our new blog by clicking this link.

 This post, Balihoo Announces Integrated Co-op Marketing Solution, can be read on our new blog by clicking this link.

I fly a lot. And by a lot, I mean A LOT. On average, I’m on probably 12 to 15 different flights in a given month. So despite the fact that I have the pre-flight safety message completely memorized on multiple airlines (yes, they are different depending on the airline) and now know what they mean when they say, “flight attendants, please prepare for cross-check”, I rarely see anything that stands out as extraordinary. This was until just recently…

I was flying on Southwest Airlines from Boise to Oakland. When I arrived in Oakland and was getting off the plane, I noticed something that I have never seen before. I was about 15 rows back and by the time I had made it from my seat to the front of the plane, the pilot had already dawned rubber cleaning gloves and was assisting the flight attendants with cleaning the aircraft cabin. As I walked by I heard one of the flight attendants say to the pilot, “thank you so much for helping, we really appreciate it.”

This blew me away. In an industry that is plagued with a reputation of unfriendly employees, delayed flights and non-profitable business models, this was a welcoming sight. With the selflessness that I witnessed, it is no surprise why Southwest consistently ranks #1 for on time performance and employee satisfaction. Not to mention, they actually turn a profit! Their continued success starts and ends with their employees working as a true, selfless team.

This whole experience reminded me of the company that I am privileged to work for, and thus the site that this blog is posted on. Balihoo demonstrates teamwork to a tee. In-fact, its in-line with one of our core values, Ownership.  At Balihoo, employees do their job and they do their jobs exceptionally well. However, there isn’t a single person on the team who wouldn’t put something from their own plate aside to help another team member out who might be overwhelmed, stressed, or approaching a critical deadline. It’s behavior like this that companies spend countless hours trying to instill amongst their employees but continually fall short of accomplishing. Balihoo has mastered it and clearly, so has Southwest Airlines.

One of the great opportunities that came with our recent investment from OpenView Ventures, is the support that OpenView provides to their portfolio companies.   A couple of weeks ago we were privileged to have Jeff Sutherland (his website) spend a couple of days in our office looking at our Agile processes for improvement opportunities.

Jeff is credited with inventing the Agile software development framework known as Scrum. Scrum is not a complex acronym like many terms in software but actually comes from a Rugby formation that requires team self organization due to the chaotic nature of play.  Balihoo has employed Agile techniques for almost 3 years based on the Scrum framework.  Agile and Scrum are centered on simple concepts but as any designer will tell you simplicity is not always easy.  As a team we went through dozens of iterations to refine, improve or even change based on current internal or external conditions. 

However when you are making changes sub-optimal habits can sometimes creep in, creating derivations that add potentially needless complexity.  For example, a couple of months ago I walked readers on this blog through our sprint capacity and estimation process.  Yes it worked very well, however it wasn’t exactly simple. Having Jeff in the office offered us an opportunity to ground ourselves and do some resetting to reducing some of our current process pain points, increase throughput, decreasing team stress and simply to re-energize the team.

Some our our identified impediments:

• We had increasing levels of churn and change during out sprints due to quality issues and high priority small business needs, which created disruption to the current sprint in terms of planned work and team focus
• Estimation in ideal days was becoming further and further from actual duration, and did not offer us an effective way of measuring increases in team velocity even though it was obvious that the team was getting more efficient
• Slippage in the definition of ‘done’ allowing story points to burn down based on completion of development and not based on well defined and testable AT’s (acceptance tests)
• Increasing number of stakeholders with product requests, often pre-scheduled into upcoming sprints making it difficult to have one single source of truth on business priorities

Here are some of the changes we have made in the past 2 weeks:

• Implemented software (Jira + Greenhopper) to help manage our product pipeline, execution and release process and create one single source of the truth (note:  this process of reviewing software options actually started about a month earlier, and just happened to coincide nicely with the other changes)
• Reduced our sprint cycle from 4 weeks to 2 weeks to address the uncertainty in our business
• Switched to story points over ideal days with ‘reference stories’ to better measure team velocity.  We are using story points for both rough estimates as well as planning estimates and not converting to hours/days once a sprint is underway.  Points are burned down only once the story is tested.
• Formally creating point buckets within a sprint:  60% to new work, 20% for refinement, and 20% for unanticipated changes.  The unanticipated changes bucket is like a token system for the company giving some level of flexibility while maintaining order.  If the tokens are not used the team will pull from the backlog to finish up the sprint.
• Creation of a team impediments list to focus on bigger items that could be acted upon to improve our process and increase team velocity
• Refocus on scrum fundamentals in the planning, estimation and sprint review

As of today we are a couple days from finishing our first two week sprint since doing a reset after Jeff’s visit and things are looking great out of the gates.  The team is excited, and the organization is experiencing greater transparency into current priorities than in our company history.   (Once we have a few sprints under our belt I will present some statistics on the results)

If you have ever worked in a large company with their complicated software development methodologies its easy to see how bloat can creep into the process over time.  Refocusing on simplicity is sometimes difficult but worth the effort in the end.

Also of interest:  A few months back I discussed our use of Agile concepts across the company.  We are now moving on to phase two of this process so stay tuned.

As a media planner here at Balihoo, I have the pleasure of working with individuals from all over the country. Whether I am contacting media reps, vendors, or even the local Chamber of Commerce to learn nuances about a specific market, I get to talk to someone new just about every day. I wade through different accents (and try my best not to take them “on” myself during phone calls… I do a great New Yorker) and personalities in order to gain all the information I need to make a solid recommendation within a media plan.

This past week I was hunting down information about Columbia, South Carolina. After conducting my due diligence on print mediums, I decided to call one of the larger local papers for some additional information. A lovely young lady picked up the phone with a looooooooooong southern greeting. I proceeded to tell her my name, where I was from, and the purpose for the call. Before I could get the entire sentence out she stopped me and asked that I repeat the name of the “agency” I was from. I told her again… “Balihoo”. She practically screamed in to the phone and said that she had just welcomed a new puppy into her home named Ballyhoo. She grew up on the coast of South Carolina and lived on a street called Ballyhoo. After her family moved away she vowed that one day she would get a dog and name her Ballyhoo. Naturally, I

proceeded to tell her that not only is our organization named Balihoo, but we are represented by another furry friend named ‘Scout’. We both thought the coincidences were unbelievable. I asked her to send over a photo of Ballyhoo hoping that she would in some way resemble our Scout. As you can see their differences are pretty black and white but both pups are adorable.

It is a delight to speak to and work with people from all over the country. Not only have I learned a great deal about what factors contribute to advertising successes and failures and what market trends exist all over the nation, but I’ve grown to appreciate all the different people and personalities I get the privilege of interacting with on a daily basis.

I mean truly… what are the odds of finding a “real live” Ballyhoo in South Carolina? It made my day.

Here it is, just a few months late, an updated tour of our offices!  You can also see some of the in-process pictures and get some of the design details straight from our talented designers site:  Guigon Olson Studios.   

Agile software development in a startup is fast, challenging, exciting and dynamic however one of the hardest things to accomplish in this environment are  predictability and repeatability.  When teams start agile development the first sprint(s) can often be disastrous, and lead to abandonment.  The easiest way to build predictability into the process is to think about a Agile development as a simple supply (engineering resources) and demand (product needs) relationship.  The key is to increase the accuracy on both sides of the equation.  

When you read literature on Agile development there are a couple of standard techniques suggested to improve predictability:

• Triangulation:  The process of tracking estimates and then when a ‘like’ feature comes up you use previous estimates to triangulate in on a reasonable estimate. 
• Cycle Velocity: Teams track velocity or points throughput over a given (short) development cycle, and uses this as a starting point for the next cycle.

Great!  except that in practice these are marginally effective at first.  One of the things we have found to be a great step forward on the demand-side estimates was to create better definition around the base estimation factor.  Estimation, and product throughput in agile development is typically measured in ‘points’. There are different schools of though on how a point is defined. Through time and experience we have found the following definition works best for us:  A point is one day’s worth of development time with little to no interruptions by a senior software developer.

With a more defined based estimation factor we then added complexity multipliers to our user stories (feature requests) to help with triangulation.  Often we would get bogged down in a lot of what if discussion which is good, but often created angst among the developers when trying to create estimates. We moved to a model where estimates were stated as best-case, and then we would add multipliers for both technical complexity and business complexity to generate a risk adjusted estimate in addition to the best case.

Now what about the supply-side?  Often overlooked, but just as important…If not analyzed correctly it can create an overworked engineering team.  Of course in a startup, everyone is overworked, but the key is sustainability. Especially with small teams and short development cycles small supply-side ‘events’ can wreak havoc on predictable product throughput. We have found that the following items need to be effectively factored into the supply-side calculation:

• Team member skill levels
• Vacation time
• Overhead/support needs

Every team member starts out with a baseline FTE (full time equivalent) value of 1.  First we start by adjusting the baseline value down to adjust for skill differences in junior resources. Any vacation days that the engineer will be taking during the sprint cycle are then factored in, as well as the expected % overhead (P1 bugs, production support)  that each resource will be expected to cover during the cycle. Calculated out for each resource and then added the numbers together gives you a net FTE count for the team, which can then be multiplied against the days in the sprint to give you a baseline supply estimate.

During sprint planning we then begin estimating against the demand until you hit a number where the supply-side estimate is approximately sitting between the demand-side best case estimate and the risk adjusted estimate (assuming some stories will work out closer to best case and some will work out closer to worst case). 

These minor enhancements along with team experience have allowed us to create an extremely predicable product development process, that is not only repeatable but also sustainable.  All critical in startup product management and software development.

If this concept interests you - let me known and I can send you the spreadsheet template.