About Forrester
Forrester Research, Inc. is an independent research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice to global leaders in business and technology.

Benjamin serves eBusiness & Channel Strategy Professionals. His research focuses on how consumers perceive, adopt, and use new technologies and what that means for business executives at consumer companies, encompassing topics like customer segmentation, business models, and managing multiple distribution channels.
His research explores how emerging technologies like the Internet and mobile phones affect consumers' behavior, what motivates their use of different channels for different tasks, and how new channels and technologies are changing consumers' media consumption and their relationships with consumer firms like retailers and financial services companies. In particular, he specializes in understanding the effect of the Internet and other new technologies on business models in retail financial services, including payments, banking, lending, investments, and insurance.
During his 13 years at Forrester, Benjamin has worked in the company's Consumer Technographics®, financial services, and eBusiness channel & product management professional teams. He is based in Forrester's London office.
Before he joined Forrester, Benjamin was an analyst at Fletcher Research, the UK Internet research company that Forrester acquired. There, he researched the nascent online retail, online financial services, and online advertising markets. Before joining Fletcher Research, Benjamin worked as a financial journalist in London for four years.
Benjamin has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford.
There are blog posts that you can write without doing any prior work (he says, looking meaningfully at himself in the mirror), and then there are blog posts that require real work. This very...
Requirements Go From Unfortunate Necessity To Strategic Asset
Requirements have undergone a quiet revolution — the conversations have moved from a focus on the high cost of bad requirements to the positive value of good requirements. Not satisfied with...
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) has forced technology companies to re-examine and re-imagine innovation. Tech companies were used to treating everything beyond invention as someone else's problem; SaaS...

A common question we analysts hear from our clients is, "How do we scale our Agile efforts?" Now, let's be clear: the question is not how to get Agile to work in a large project. Sure, there are...
Practically everyone who visits the Vatican stops to take a picture of the Swiss Guards. Ditto for the Queen's Guard at Windsor Castle, the Royal Life Guards at Rosenborg Castle in Copenhagen,...
Complexity is the nemesis of application developers everywhere. While software products' complexity may be, to a great extent, unavoidable, we don't have to complicate software development to...
Another excellent post from Scott Sehlhorst, this time pointing out that, even without product managers, product management still happens. Scott’s post is a response to Jason Calcanis, the...
A big part of my research agenda for this year is productization. Many app dev teams see productization as a way to innovate better, achieve more sustainable results at a lower cost, deal with some...
Politics is a word that we use so loosely that it risks losing meaning altogether. When we talk about office politics, as some recent posts by product management bloggers, we're usually...
Other Industries Have Moved Beyond Product Marketing And Lead Generation
Compared with other industries, B2B technology industry companies treat marketing as an opportunity to sell new products and services to new customers. For these vendors, the product is the axis...
In the technology industry, there has been a rising chorus of questions about the role of the executive in Agile adoption. The recent acceleration of Agile adoption has a lot to do with the...
A few quick observations on what we've seen at Agile 2010 this week: Diversity. Agile 2009 attracted a diverse audience of developers, project managers, QA technicians, product managers,...
[For earlier posts in this series, click here and here.] Imagine that you're dining at a new Italian restaurant that just opened in your neighborhood. You've heard that the chef is well...
Fiction writers I've met have said that the hardest section of a novel to write is not the beginning or ending but everything that happens in between. The middle chapters trace the course of the...
One of the core priniciples of Agile is a realistic attitude about the unknown. We might have a rough idea of how much work it will take to complete a project, but we cannot state with the certainty...
At Each End Of The Innovation Process, You Need A Different Kind Of Lab
In the technology industry, two types of labs exist, each contributing to different parts of the innovation process. The stereotypical lab, focused on pure research, is the source of good ideas from...
Lately, I've been working on behalf of some Forrester clients to answer the question, "How do we build a community?" Frequently, the answer is, "You don't build a community. You expand it."...
By now, the arguments for improving product requirements are very familiar – all too familiar. Bad requirements lead to misconceived projects, many of which fail outright. The...
IBM, Rally Software, PTC, CollabNet, Microsoft, And Serena Software Lead The Pack, With HP, Atlassian, And Rocket Aldon Following
In Forrester's 116-criteria evaluation of application life-cycle management (ALM) vendors, we identified the nine most significant software providers in the category — Atlassian, CollabNet, HP,...

The Australian product management consultancy brainmates just published the results of a survey on a very interesting topic, social media usage among PMs. The short list of questions get right to...
One of the face palm moments I had while researching PM's role in SaaS was the timeline for platform and app development. The traditional path for on-premise products was platform first, then...
Now that we've posted the outline for our study of thought leadership in the technology industry, it's a good time to take stock of our success so far. It's important to start the...
[As promised, here's the first in the series about the tech industry's drive to reduce complexity.] Remember the magic number? It's the one thing from Psych 101 that you should recall,...
The always incisive and effervescent April Dunford has a great post at her blog Rocket Watcher about the reasons why your start-up needs a website, before you have a product to talk about. I...