Jeff Patton & Associates is a small consultancy lead by Jeff Patton, veteran product manager, Agile, Lean, UX, and product design evangelist.

We help clients build a culture, process, and practices focused on creating great products. To help our clients do this, Jeff Patton uses his 20+ years in commercial software development and partners with other experienced coaches and consultants to tailor offerings to fit your organization’s goals.

It’s all about the product.

We believe that organizations succeed based on their ability to create a product their customers love. That profit, or real shareholder value, is a consequence of creating great things and not a goal unto itself. Your organization may create a software product, or a service like a bank account or insurance policy. It could create a physical product that customers see, touch, and use. But, there’s always a product and a customer there somewhere. And in today’s world, there’s always technology involved somewhere along the line. The mistake we help clients to avoid is to see that technology not as an overhead expense to manage, but as a critical part of your product, no matter what kind of product it is.

Successful product organizations have upped their game.

Sadly, traditional organizations rely on leaders to come up with great ideas, and others to turn those into products. It’s after a long design and development cycle that they see the real market outcomes. And, they’re rarely what anyone predicted.

Successful Contemporary Product Organizations:

• Look to leadership to describe vision and set direction
• Ask that everyone in the organization take ownership of product design, delivery and ultimately product success
• Make good use of Agile, Lean, Lean Startup, and UX design principles, process, and practices
• Use technology and process approaches that support rapid experimentation and learning
• Learn through everyday exposure to their customers and through the data they collect that allows them to make more objective data-driven decisions
• Work quickly and collaboratively – a comfortable level of urgency drives everything they do
• Take pride in the products they help design, build, and support.

Our teaching, consulting, and coaching support these practices.

If what you’ve just read above doesn’t ring true for where you’d like to see your organization go, please don’t waste your time reviewing the services below. I promise you’ll be unhappy with the results. But, if these ideas do resonate with you, please consider the service offerings below to be a good starting point for discussion. Through discussion we can co-create an approach tailored to fit where your company is today, and where you’d like to go.