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Agile and Product Management

craig — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 20:50:25 +0000

Agile should be the product managers friend, but at times it can feel like you’ve lost all control especially when you can’t work on product development 100% of the time because of all the other things you have to get done.

So what should you do, do you hand off your other responsibilities to the marketing team or do you bring in someone to work full time on product development. From our point of view it depends on where you are in the product lifecycle, how your organisation is set up and what your strategic priorities are.

The folks over at Pragmatic Marketing talk about 2 different types of roles. A product owner (a scrum term) who sits within the agile development team and defines requirements, removes roadblocks and researches new functions and a product manager who sits outside of the development team but who has ultimate responsibility for the product being brought into the market place. In some cases they feel the 2 roles can be covered by an experienced agile product manager and in other cases they are split.

If you do take on the role, agile product management is not for the faint hearted. You may not be used to being so close to the development team, delivering your product in an iterative manner or not fully knowing what will be delivered until it is, but don’t worry you’ll get there in the end and it always helps to have some one around who’s been through it before. Some of the pitfalls to avoid include being tempted to change requirements or drop in new features during an iteration, spending too long documenting features or not planning what you want to deliver a couple of iterations ahead remember of course your plan may change.

In the end, agile won’t solve all of your problems. You still need to get out there, talk to your customers and shape the information you gather into something that your team can deliver. What it should do though is bring you closer to your product sooner than you would have normally been, which hopefully means you don’t get that confused feeling at the end of a project where you wonder why on earth the team built what they did.

Here are few articles, presentations and books we have come across that should help you out:

Can Agile Work With UX

craig — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 07:59:53 +0000

We find this is one of the most common questions asked within the companies we have worked and with the people in our teams.

The typical view of agile is that its all about hacking the code, no documentation and developers going off and doing their own thing, whereas with UX and User Centred Design (UCD) in particular the view is that it all takes too long, the design has to be perfect, we have to check with all of these users and we could have built and launched it by now…

The key issue seems to be how do you fit some of the fundamental UX methods into the small iterations that Agile develop teams work. A lot of teams run parallel design and build iterations, so that the design team has the time to create concepts and test them before handing them over to be built. This approach works but doesn’t really fit in with the agile principles of a team working together on discreet pieces of functionality within the same iteration

Another way to bring the teams together is to extend the scope of iteration 0 by not only looking at planning but also defining a high level information architecture, because changing this halfway through a project is very painful. We are not talking about Big Design Up Front (BDUF) but just enough so that you can understand how the product fits together.

In the end we think it comes down to the people more than the process, if the team wants to make it work they will find a way, just as the Agile Manifesto says it should.

We don’t think we have the perfect answer and there are lots of resources out on the web on this subject, below is a list of links to other articles, presentations and blog posts that we’ve read along the way.

What is Agile

craig — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 22:46:22 +0000

Agile is a term many people have heard of but perhaps don’t fully know what it means. Agile refers to a group of software development methodologies and techniques based around iterative development where requirements and solutions evolve over time through collaboration of cross-functional teams.

The key premise behind the agile movement was that traditional software development approaches (typically termed waterfall approaches) took too long to deliver working software and typically solved the problem identified at the start of a project which was often not the same problem that needed resolving by the time the software was finally delivered.

Agile aimed to deliver software quickly through close collaboration, iterative development, continuous testing and frequent deployment. This meant the “business” could get its hands on working software much sooner, which reduced confusion around what was actually being delivered. The agile banner covers a number of methodologies, these include Scrum, XP, Crystal, DSDM, Evo and others.

All of these methodologies encompass similar principles and are based around the 4 key pillars of the agile manifesto namely:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

Here at Agile bench we love agile because of it’s pragmatic approach to building software. It’s about business benefit, building for the now with an eye on the future, focusing on how our software can make a difference to the bottom line and collaborating with out colleagues instead of creating barriers between departments. It’s about the business benefit we deliver not the job titles we are given.

Here are some links to further reading about agile development:

Here are some books you may want to read to get started on your agile journey:

Agile and Iterative Development: A Manager’s Guide – Great for an overview of agile
Scrum and XP from the trenches – Once you’ve read the books this field guide helps make the theory work in a real environment
User Stories Applied – How to create and manage requirements

Is the agile community inclusive?

mark — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 12:26:33 +0000

Agile 2009 is huge. There are 1350 people with 23 streams of talks across 2 buildings, which is pretty crazy. It is impossible to get across the entire line-up of talks so you have to be selective. Thankfully the sessions are divided by experience, persona and some more general groupings.

The persona divisions are pretty interesting. There are the traditional agile personas such as software developers (experience and new to agile), testers and business analysts. These sessions are focused on making you better at your skill-set within an agile environment. The agile community, and more generally, people new to agile, focus a lot on becoming more proficient in their current domain. There are great resources on pair programming, refactoring, test-driven design, mocking and stubbing and basic project management around and have been for a while.

Software development is a microcosm of product development and to build great products you need (gasp) more than just software developers, testers and analysts. The UX, product management and leadership (as opposed to management) communities are starting to be represented more equitably, which is a good thing for the Agile community. When these communities collaborate together we build better products which is something we all value.

With the establishment of the “PMI Agile Community of Practice” http://ow.ly/llUl project managers are moving closer to the agile community that will be good for both communities.

But there are a few major personas missing. On the delivery side, what happened to the system and database administrators? On the organizational side where are the accountants?

The fact that the Agile community is becoming more inclusive of other disciplines is great. But has it gone far enough?

What do you think?