Comments on: Agile Product Management

By: Andreas Rudolph

Andreas Rudolph — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 20:16:31 +0000

Thanks. Yes, this blog has a facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Produkt-Manager/130288313671652. In the timeline can you find all posts, and you find there more articles, and related.

Make sure to like it to receive regular updates.

By: Cecilia Brunback

Cecilia Brunback — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 18:41:29 +0000

What a writeup!! Very informative and easy to understand. Looking for more such blog posts!! Do you have a myspace or a facebook?
I recommended it on digg. The only thing that it’s missing is a bit of new design. Nevertheless thank you for this information.

By: piano tutor

piano tutor — Sat, 29 May 2010 07:23:50 +0000

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By: Andreas Rudolph

Andreas Rudolph — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 17:21:31 +0000

Thanks for your feedback. That role of product management (define a product in a way that it can be commercialized in terms of high-performance) is certainly becomming more and more important in an agile world.

By: Kenton Pechin

Kenton Pechin — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 03:24:31 +0000

To commercialise in full terms of high-performance rather than monetary value, and in order to specialize accordingly, you want to play along the official format of the 4 Ps marketing plan. That is, Price, Product, Place and Promotion obviously you recognise the serious properties of the product, and the cost, but for place you should remember around the type of mass who are willing to give over 4x price of competing product whereas the second-class option may be sold where accent is on cost, your ware will be suited to places/distributors where the clients will be willing to pay for high-performance. Thank you for this article! I’ve just learned a surely incredible news portal about panda marketing Taste it!

By: Andreas Rudolph

Andreas Rudolph — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 16:43:20 +0000

Steve,

you are making a good point. Also in my experience, a kind of capacity levelling is essential in making you a good PM (and perhaps the only way to survive, if you are the one guy, who needs to fill all these roles in person, which you mentioned). An additional improvement in terms of agile would be that you reserve more time for release independent items (so to speak, you work one day for devt, and their immediate needs, 3 days for the others, and 1 day for the futue needs).

“Isolation”: Yes, up to a certain extend, it is required to decouple PM from Devt to enable agile. One reason, other than capacity is “maturity”. In my experience, a development, which is finished, is not always finished, but requires some iterations. Simply speaking: In the waterfall area devt worked on one requirement after the other, and at the end, we put all together, and improved consistency. After that we went to marketing, and rolled it out. If devt now works with agile methods, you need to somehow take care not to loose the benefits of this consistency phase.

Andreas

By: Andreas Rudolph

Andreas Rudolph — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 16:20:00 +0000

Matthew,

great point. In terms of surfacing, I think that there are two separate areas:

- Companies want to make development projects more agile. Here sprints, etc make perfect sense (or at least they can work).
- You need to make sure that the rest might follow a different agility pattern (as it might not make sense to just dump the sprints, etc into the complete organization).

My guess is that the interface is important between development and the rest (speaking technically: you need to uncouple both systems). At least, if you want to achieve that the solution to one problem does not create others.

Andreas

By: Steve Johnson

Steve Johnson — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 13:30:00 +0000

Whether you call it product manager or product owner or Fred, what matters is that the dev team have real and up-to-date info on the market. The challenge for many in agile is that developers want 24/7 access to product managers and ALSO want up-to-date information from the market. Alas, one cannot do both. product managers need to allocate time with development and also plan time in the market. My rule is to spend no more than one day each week with the dev team (time for planning on the front end and demos on the back end of the sprint); that leaves time for working with sales, marketing, support, and execs–as well as time available to spend time with customers.

The other challenge of course is that agile development dramatically improves development but impacts the rest of the organization. Agile shouldn’t be implemented in isolation. All downstream departments are affected so they need to embrace agile methods as well.

Steve

By: Matthew Bowe

Matthew Bowe — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 13:10:15 +0000

Great discussion points! I’ve always jokingly said, Agile creates more problems than it solves. Really, though, it SURFACES problems in the organization so they have to be dealt with. And, I would also agree with you that if the entire team of stakeholders is not on the same page, it can make the PM (or BA)’s job much more difficult.