The growing economic pressures on media enterprises, including newspapers, has certainly been felt at Washington Post Media. As a result, the company has set out to develop new products and business models to increase customer engagement and company revenue.

Creating these new kinds of products — innovative, experimental, likely to change, with potential to fail — required new methods of design, development, and project management. The IT and business teams had to align their practices with principals often associated with startup companies: low up-front costs, shorter time to market, and most importantly, the agility to adapt quickly to changing business or customer needs.

So they did. The team adopted agile project management techniques (primarily Scrum), and applied them to the building of their first new product, TastePost (http://tastepost.com).

This talk will briefly discuss:

• the common historical project management methodologies at The Washington Post
• the pressure and strategic decisions that led to new product development

...and delve more deeply into:

• the primary tenants of the new agile methodology
• the differences in roles, practice, business expectations for agile projects
• how they were applied to the TastePost product
• the lessons learned from the experiments so far

With a background in marketing, design, and technology, Dave Burke focuses on bridging the gaps between those disciplines to create web products that delight both users and business owners.

As Manager of Web Solutions at Washington Post Media, Dave leads a cross-disciplinary team — designers, information architects, and developers — in the creation, support, and measurement of Washington Post web applications. These include e-commerce, customer acquisition and self-service, B2B content, publishing, and internal collaboration/productivity.

He has spoken on user research and usability, agile development, and enterprise social networking at The Washington Post, the USDA Graduate School, and George Washington University.

Dave and his MacBook Pro commute by train to DC from his home in Baltimore, where his wife, Kim, recently completed her doctorate at the Johns Hopkins University.