Panel on Agile Product Management:

• John Mansour, ZigZag Marketing. They sell training around Product Management - "if you don't need it, we don't sell it"
• Greg Cohen - Dir. Business Development at the 280 Group - Product Management contracting/consulting company
• Jason Tanner - General Manager at NetQoS - responsible for the end to end management of a specific product that had been "left for dead" for half a year

As to agile development in general - John thinks it's not that prevalent in the industry. There's still a lot more talk than there is walk, and most of it seems to still be waterfall. The rest of the panel concurs. Audience query: more resistance from Product Managers to agile than from Developers?

"Ask 10 different companies to define agile, and you'll get 10 different answers". You need a Product Manager who is open to change, or you won't get it. Financial Services firms came up, and it's noted that iterative/agile is more common there, because they are in a constant "arms race" with the competition.

"A lot of product managers are actually functional designers" - they should just re-title themselves. What is functional design? These are customer surrogates who will work with engineering to create the way the interaction works (User Experience Design). This is often a missing function at a company, and it often gets lost in the PM role.

What about trying to walk into agile from waterfall without help? ("on the cheap" to quote the questioner). Why not pay for a week or two of training that will get everyone on the same page? Getting an external expert (with the consultant "halo") to explain why this is a good idea is a good investment. Note from the panel - failures happen when agile gets adopted in isolation, and an attempt is made to follow a cookie cutter "straight from the book" process.

Question: How does agile change what PM does? "It forces them to get out of the building and meet customers" - find out what they do, how they do it, why they do it - and use that information to align requirements with what customers really need.

The real benefit of an agile approach for Product Management is that you are validating the things you are building can actually be sold - bearing in mind that you cannot become so "customer focused" that you forget the market.

Wrap up question: If agile teams could do one thing better, what would it be?

The one thing that keeps agile ticking is discipline and testing. Concurrence on the panel: unit testing is crucial, because it keeps the team focused. Solid unit testing dropped Q/A from 2 weeks per sprint (3 week sprint) to 4 hours. One more comment: trying to adopt without training of some kind is a potential failure point.

Technorati Tags: product management