During 2008-2010, Rich Mironov keynoted a series of one-day seminars in Bellevue and Seattle WA, Fairfax VA, Santa Clara and Burlingame CA on Agile adoption presented by leading Agile solution providers. The two most popular talks were “Agile Fundamentals, ROI and Engineering BestPractices” and “Mitigating Risk with Agile Development.” Both include a quick review of agile, how executives think about agile (and software development in general), plus thoughts on organizational challenges in roll out agile.
These events had lively discussions and disagreements about applying agile in various settings, and how to keep organizational or business needs aligned with development priorities. All attendees received a copy of Rich’s book “The Art of Product Management”.
Agile Fundamentals, ROI and Engineering Best Practices
Mitigating Risk with Agile Development
With thanks to the various event sponsors:
P-Camp ‘10: Thinking Like an Agile Product Manager
At Silicon Valley P-Camp ‘10 (March 13th), Rich Mironov led a session on “How Agile Changes Waterfall PM Processes and Thinking.” This was a tall order for a 45-minute colllaborative session with 120+ attendees, so we ran a real-time exercise in creating, prioritizing and attacking a backlog of agile PM issues. The room was full of enthusiastic attendees, both agile veterans and newbies, with good insights/advice from the crowd.
Agenda:
- Handful of level-setting slides (< 15 minutes) – see the slides
- Prioritize and time-box questions / issues raised by the group, i.e. build a backlog (< 10 minutes)
- Tackle issues based on priority (20 minutes, allocated 5 minutes each for top 4 issues)
- Thumbnail retrospective (3 minutes)
Rather than just talking about agile thinking and agile processes, we did a tiny re-enactment of some key process steps. The group raised 7 issues and ranked them as follows:
1. How much should/must we document requirements? – TIME-BOXED to 5 MINUTES
2. How to prioritize a list of 100 items (tools and strategies for handling long lists) – TIME-BOXED to 5 MINUTES
3. Where does UED/UI fit? We added architecture, since that has many of the same issues. – TIME-BOXED to 5 MINUTES
4. Agile metrics – TIME-BOXED to 5 MINUTES
5. How to deal with waterfall thinkers?
6. What to do about opinionated chickens (i.e. those who are interested but not committed)
7. What about engineers who don’t like product management?
This helped remind us of the essential nature of backlogs: that we don’t get everything done in any one iteration or release, but attacking the highest priority items gets them done first. In our (very limited) 5 minutes per topic, there were good suggestions and solutions from the floor, including (by topic):
1. Attack requirements iteratively, with less detail up front and more as teams engage with specific stories and raise questions; aim for ‘just enough’ based on team’s knowledge; do enough to motivate the next discussion with Dev team.
2. Prioritize only the top portion (e.g. 30 items) of your list and leave the rest for last; use a scoring/weighting scheme spreadsheet to group and rank items; apply various tools called out by the participants
3. Rich’s strong bias that a UED framework must exist at the beginning of a project, just as a product architecture must exist if this is a complex cross-team effort, and just as a business model/customer segmentation theory must be in place before spending lots of money on development. Sketching of the “one ahead, one behind” model for designing and testing UED elements.
4. A very brief extension past team’s story velocity toward economic value metrics per story or epic.
In a whirlwind retrospective (purely for structural completeness), the collective wisdom was that next time we might actually propose solutions to the above rather than just talking briefly about them.
Some of this material was lifted from earlier discussions and presentations on product manager/product owner issues, for instance this Product Camp NYC talk.
Third Annual Silicon Valley P-Camp
The third annual Silicon Valley P-Camp was the largest gathering of product managers ever! 550 product managers got together for a Saturday of discussions, talks, panels, networking, fun, food, t-shirts and surprises. Under the leadership of SVPMA and with Yahoo! generosity. 34 sessions, talks and panels were chosen from 70 proposals, for a long day of collaboration and participation. A wiki was set up to capture presentations, comments, photos and other information.
What is P-Camp? Now spreading around the world as Product Camps, it is a one-day gathering of product folks to share, present, network, learn, laugh and discuss. Full event details at http://pcamp10.weebly.com/ . A list of events in other cities (countries) is maintained at ProductCamp.org.
What: Silicon Valley P-Camp 2010
When: Saturday, March 13, 2010, 8AM to 4PM
Where: Yahoo! HQ, Building C, 701 First Ave, Sunnyvale
Cost: FREE! Included lunch and a P-Camp ‘10 t-shirt
Wiki: http://pcamp2010.onconfluence.com/
The biggest-ever P-Camp used an online voting model to create an agenda for the morning and a live “dot-voting” model for the afternoon. (Rich ran a session on agile PM thinking.) Here was our final agenda:
10AM
- Why would anyone want to hire YOU? (Barbara Nelson)
- Practical metrics for any product manager (panel led by Greg Cohen, Tom Grant, DuttaSatadip)
- Visualize Product Success (Michael Deutch)
- First two years in the life of a Product Manager (Rishi Bhargava)
- Avoiding the Top 7 Mistakes Bringing New Products to Market (Steve Tennant)
- PM Productivity: How To Get Twice as Much Done in Half the Time (Brian Lawley)
- Product Management in a Start-Up Environment (Adam Birch)
11AM
- What do buyers really want? (Alan Armstrong)
- Anthropology for the Product Manager (Paula Gray)
- Domain Knowledge: Does it Matter? (Larry McKeogh)
- Use of Social Media for Product Marketing Research (Scott Gilbert)
- Segmenting Customers: How to do it quickly and effectively to improve products (Dutta Satadip),
- Agile product managers: how agile changes waterfall PM processes and thinking (Rich Mironov)
- How to Create a Compelling Financial Model for Your Business Plan (panel led by Nupur Thakur)
115PM
- Positioning your most important product: YOU (John Mansour)
- Finding product/market fit through customer development (Cindy Alvarez)
- Making Web 2.0 work for product management (Andrew Filev)
- Lean product management (Greg Cohen)
- Credibility and authority for product management & product marketing (Alan Armstrong)
- How to create innovative ideas at will (Susan Robertson)
- Innovation games in agile practice (Nancy Frishberg)
215PM
- Creating your most persuasive messaging/value proposition (Michael Cannon)
- Use on-line communities to turbo-charge your product roadmap (Scott Blacker)
- Product strategy 101 (Sue Raisty-Egami)
- Productivity tools and tips in product management (Michael Deutch)
- Measuring business value for partners and communities (Russ Thomas)
- How to be a phenomenal product manager (Brian Lawley)
- Product management and branding in a services oriented business (Adam Birch)
315PM
- Agile requirements gathering (Chris Sims)
- Story craft (Dennis Britton)
- Cloud Software (Saas) PM: How does it differ from traditional software PM? (John Ahlander)
- Prototyping for PM; get your ideas tested and shown fast (Etay Gafni)
- So engineering makes all the key decisions (Phil Burton)
- How to choose the right methodologies to gather customer input (Jen Berkley)
Sponsors
We’re grateful to P-Camp’s sponsors, starting with SVPMA and Yahoo!
Additional gold sponsors: 280 Group, FusionCharts, Pragmatic Marketing, Sequent Learning,The UC Berkeley Center for Executive Education and Zigzag Marketing.
Silver sponsors: Accept Software, Enthiosys, Innovation Games, Pivotal Product Management, Primary Intelligence, Sure Product Consulting, Splunk, UltimateinSuccess and Wrike.
Market Facts, Judgment, Fallibility and Ownership
Or how I learned to stop worrying and love market uncertainty.
Every few weeks, I find myself itching to play the product management “heavy.” This is the moment when I want to yell “….because I’m the product manager and I said so!” Not an ideal strategy for PMs or parents. Here’s a more productive approach, with input from many other PMs.
Assuming we’ve been doing our homework all along and are working with well-intentioned, rational people, we can make the following case to technical and marketing teams: Continue reading
A great SVPMA talk: "How To Get That Next PM Job"
Last Weds (March 5th), Shreyas Doshi had the SVPMA podium for a talk on “How To Get That Next PM Job”
This was an astonishingly wonderful talk: crisp, funny, and relentlessly on-point. When I wasn’t applauding and smacking my forehead, I was jealous.
Shreyas is in product management at Google, and recapped what we’ve all forgotten about whether you want to be in product management (talk to 8 PMs first); the process of getting jobs (think it through from the hiring side, practice, do your research, have an interesting resume, start a blog) as well as PM jobs that suck (at companies that don’t care about engineering). Even this grizzled PM veteran learned something.
Shreyas went with a light-hearted ‘back of the napkin’ style. See his SlideShare below. FYI, he blogs at No Batteries Included.