Agile Product Management with Scrum: Creating Products that Customers Love

2. Envisioning the Product

It wasn’t fun to have a telephone conference in the early 1990s. Participants would often have to turn their heads away from the table and shout into a microphone. When people talked simultaneously, their voices cut out, turning conversation into gibberish. Polycom, a company that specializes in telepresence, video, voice, and content-sharing solutions, recognized that its customers needed telephone conferences that felt more like natural face-to-face conversations—without any distortion, echoes, or other interruptions. So Polycom envisioned a product with the following attributes (Lynn and Reilly 2002, 63):

• Superb audio quality—allowing more than one person at a time to speak and still be understood

• Simple to ...