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:

• http://theagileproductmanager.blogspot.com/2008/07/going-agile-consider-this.html
• http://www.slideshare.net/Enthiosys/agile2009-product-managerproduct-owner-dilemma?src=embed
• http://www.pragmaticmarketing.com/pdf/Living_in_an_Agile_World.pdf
• http://www.enthiosys.com/insights-tools/a09-recap/
• http://www.pragmaticmarketing.com/publications/magazine/4/4/0608bn
• The Art of Product Management
• http://crankypm.com/2007/04/so-you-think-agile-methodologies-exempt-you-from-product-management/
• http://onproductmanagement.net/2008/04/29/agiledev_and_pm/