Agile2015: Intro to Agile Product Management

I was honored to deliver the “bootcamp” session at Agile2015 on Agile Product Management.  Attendees included an eclectic mix of delivery teams, project/program managers, scrum masters, product owners and a handful of product managers.

Two fresh ideas for this presentation:

• A not-so-subtle undercutting of business value accuracy.  I claim that the error bars on business value estimates are much greater than on development sizing, so we should view computed priorities with deep suspicion
• I see most product/project fail at the chartering stage – before the first developer or product owner has been assigned, and before the first line of code written.  We’re often building entirely the wrong thing.  So we can dramatically reduce waste by doing good validation before assigning a full development team.

Product owner is a critical role for agile/scrum teams, as a key stakeholder and representative of users, customers or markets. Commercial software companies have a broader role — product manager –– responsible for identifying market needs/opportunities, making product-level decisions about offerings/benefits/pricing/packaging/channels/financial goals, and managing sales/customer relationships on behalf of executives. Since products often span multiple scrum teams, some products have a mix of product owners and product managers.  We’ll introduce product owners, map that against software product managers, and talk through approaches to meet all of the product needs for a market-successful product.  Learning Outcomes:

• What is a product owner?
• For revenue software companies, how does this align with product manager?
• Failure modes for product owners/managers and strategies to avoid those failures