Take part In this year's study of product team performance: Your voice matters.
(Enter your contact information to be entered into a random drawing for a new iPad Mini.)

We’ve just launched the fourth annual Global Study of Product Team Performance.

Take a look at my own short summaries or download the free studies from previous years. It’s been intriguing and sometimes truly incisive stuff that we’ve learned.

For example, what if you were able to identify just five things that:
  • if you don't do them, you have just a 2% chance of achieving high level team performance
  • if you do all of them, you have a 67% likelihood of high level team performance

The 2012 Study of Product Team Performance found just that.

It’s only gotten better from there.

The findings are free to all, each year. As in prior years, there are a bunch of partner companies and industry associations sponsoring it, helping us get broad participation, and defraying the costs.

You’ll get first notice of this year’s findings by taking the survey right now.

One of the reasons the study is so useful is that it can help get your senior execs on board. One of the hard truths is that sometimes it takes studies and consultants to sway disbelief. (That's one reason why my co-author and I collected 300 Rules of Thumb for managing software people and teams that we share in the quickly thumb-able center section of our book, Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams (Addison Wesley) - in addition to why studies like this one are so important.)

As always, we need your help. (And you might win a new iPad Mini, courtesy of the study’s sponsors, Project Connections, Sensor Six and Actuation Consulting! Just enter your contact information when you take the survey to enroll in the random drawing.)

We particularly need development, QA and UX practitioners. Each year we ask a standard set of questions that enables us to closely monitor industry trends including product development methodology adoption rates, how product teams perceive the effectiveness of their performance, and a wide range of other topics. To that we each year add a set of questions based upon what we have learned from previous studies and trends we believe we are witnessing in the marketplace.

This year’s new questions focus on user experience trends and reporting relationships, the impact the improving economy has had on product team turnover, backlog ownership, and much more.

We would love hear your thoughts on these subjects. You can add your voice to hundreds of others by taking the survey.

The survey takes just six minutes to fill out and it’s very user friendly.

We want to hear from you! Your perspective matters.