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

Kate serves Application Development & Delivery Professionals. She is a leading expert on customer service strategies. Her research focuses on helping organizations establish and validate customer service strategies, prioritize and focus customer service projects, facilitate customer service vendor selection, and plan for project success.
Kate has extensive industry experience, with more than 10 years of leadership at customer service software companies, where she held senior product marketing and product management roles. She is also a published author on customer service trends and best practices.
Kate earned a Bachelor of Science from the University of Toronto and a Master of Science from the University of Pennsylvania.
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...