Agile*Product*AI

They say you live in dog years when your at Amazon. I've certainly found that to be true over the last few years in the Alexa group leading the product team building new products and experiences for the automotive industry. I've needed the 7:1 dog:human ratio to ingest the culture of Amazon and the tech of Alexa! For this blog post, I'll summarize what I've learned about how Alexa works. When you say "Alexa," what exactly happens? It's not just a signal whizzing through the air; it's the culmination of years of artificial intelligence research and development. Let's take a journey through the AI that powers Amazon's Alexa Voice Service, unfolding the layers of technology that make it possible for Alexa to respond with more than just a robotic "I didn't catch that." Picture yourself asking Alexa to play your favorite song. The moment the microphone picks up your voice, a complex process kicks off. The first step is Automatic Speech...

There is a broader context that agile development fits in. We forget about that sometimes. We can apply agile and lean practices to optimize the throughput of our development teams and still fail. For the business to succeed, we got to make sure we are building the right products with the right features. Agile is just a means to an end. If we're not working on the right stuff, our business will fail, and don't be surprised if agile gets blamed! Making sure "you’re working on the right stuff" reaches outside of the software development life cycle. Your team/business/organization needs have some king of demand management practices in place. With effective demand management, you are continuously evaluating and prioritizing incoming requests. That way you’re moving the "right stuff" into product backlogs. The other side of it is evaluating your current products and projects and having the guts to kill/cancel them if they are not returning adequate value to your ...