What To Do When Your Developers Go Agile
Barb Nelsen at Pragmatic Marketing writes on the politics of agile, outlining the frustrations many product managers feel when their development organization begins adopting agile methods.
While developers sprint through development cycles, one of three things happens to product managers. 1) They are ignored. 2) They are dragged deep into the development cycle. 3) They lead the team to build products people want to buy. The first two situations are lethal to a product manager’s career. The third alternative can lead to successful products and successful careers.
She says that "the problem seems to be that everyone is trying to wrestle control from the other" but I think the destabilizing effects of a move to agile on an organization just reveal long-standing tensions between developers who want certainty about what they are supposed to build and product managers who want flexibility to respond to changing market conditions.
In the end, she says that agile doesn't really change the product manager's role. They still need to "lead the team to build products people want to buy."
A key concept is that the product manager must become the market expert and the single voice of priority on the team. Rather than just reacting to the list of requirements submitted by everyone (customers, sales, support, development, executives), the market-driven product manager visits a representative set of people in the market (including non-customers) on an ongoing basis. He keeps the team focused on the targeted market segments, buyer and user personas, and problems worth solving. He conducts surveys periodically to quantify the inputs and a keeps a prioritized list of open problems to solve.
Go Barb!
Bruce McCarthy
in Product Management, Agile
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Reader Comments (2)
Hi Bruce,
My last year at our previous employer (while I was working on leaving) including a good deal of reading on development process, esp. Agile approaches, including Scrum.
There is a lot of value in that approach. Some of the folk who now work at Kiva have been trained and used that approach before.
While we don't use a specific named approach, we are certainly greatly influenced by agile attitues and approaches. And especially as the company grows and we adjust what processes we use, they are evaluated with these concerns in mind.
-Eric
Minimal marketable functionality (MMFs) and value engineering play well with Agile. They present you with a means to deliver more value, and to learn faster. You might be surprised at differences between the amoung of value delivered when functionality is delivered in a different order.
You don't need to be Agile to do this financial engineering stuff, but shorter release cycles are necessary.