Agile Product Management, Marketing, and More
Posts tagged Agile
Where “Product Owner” as “Backlog Manager” fits best
Jul 22nd
In a recent post, Saeed Khan wrote that the Scrum role of “Product Owner” should be redefined to describe a more accurate set of responsibilities: “Backlog Manager.”
Saeed’s argument is that the Product Owner role is really a project-specific role implemented within the Agile movement as a solution to inaccessible product management. Saeed observes that more and more product management responsibility is bleeding into the Product Owner role, which is intended to be the funnel of business input to the development team. This conflicts with the primary responsibility of the role, which is to provide a set of fully groomed user stories representing the next most important features that should be built, and to be available throughout the sprint to answer questions.
After considering this since Saeed’s post, and based on my own experiences on four scrum projects, I’ve come here to propose that there is a “best case” condition under which this arrangement makes sense, and several others under which it doesn’t quite work.
The Case where a Backlog Manager makes sense
The first thing to remember is that Scrum has infiltrated software development from the custom software world. When building custom software, there is a single customer whose wants and needs are primary — and time has shown that having a representative of the customer in the war room at all times can help the development team deliver something meeting the customer’s needs in an efficient manner. In this context, because the Product Owner is often an employee of the client who has broad and wide domain knowledge, it makes sense that a single person bears all the responsibility of the product–and it makes sense that a single person can deliver it! This set of conditions does not demand that we separate the tactical “product owner” responsibilities from the business “product management” responsibilities because they are so intricately tied together–and the product is being built for one customer!
When we look at independent software vendors, however, we encounter the difficulties with balancing the strategic and tactical that many Product Managers express. A product manager must synthesize the needs of a market segment to deliver a compelling offering, and successfully prepare it to be marketed to that segment. If the Product Manager (title) occupies the role of Product Owner, spending much of his/her time on tactical items for upcoming sprints, the pattern seems to be that access to the market is less common.
It is at this point that the notion of “Time” becomes important. I believe the tactial responsibilities of backlog management can be offloaded by a Product Manager to someone filling the role of Product Owner (a Technical Product Manager, a Business Analyst, etc) under one condition: After a product’s initial release to the market.
In my ideal process, before starting construction of a new product, the Product Manager will spend significant time in the market understanding the problem space, developing business case and initial requirements, to the degree that he/she is prepared to spend a number of months focusing on development. It is only with this focus that a clear vision of the product can be brought to the team and shepherded to completion.
Backlog management will take a great deal of time, but the product manager’s command of the entire product is essential to having it built correctly. With a competent team, the Product Manager serving as Product Owner can still find time to make periodic visits to customers to get feedback on early builds and gain the input needed to “inspect and adapt.” But if this feedback only reaches the team second hand, the risk to the cohesiveness of the product is too high.
After version 1.0 of a new product, when the product is in customers’ hands and is being considered by prospects, the vision, business case and purpose of the product is already established. Now that the product is built, the product manager is looking for additional market segments and business opportunities, finding the problems which adding solutions into the product would open up new markets. Additional important and complex features may be added, but the basic nature of the product is already set. Given this stability, the profitability of this product can be managed by one individual, while the tactical implementation of new features can be efficiently offloaded to another. This is the case where separating responsibility between a Product Manager and a Product Owner makes sense.
These three statements summarize my position:
- For custom software vendors, there really is a single “product owner” that fits with Scrum orthodoxy. This “Product Owner” is a representative of the customer.
- For ISVs developing version 1 of an off the shelf product, a single person should own the business and technical sides of the product. That single person learns the market and helps build the right solution.
- For ISVs developing later releases of an off the shelf product, the backlog management responsibilities can be split from P&L / business responsibilities. The boundaries are set, and a “backlog manager” or “technical product manager” can work with the Product Manager to understand the goals of the next release and execute, while the product manager coordinates sales, channels, support, and other arms of the company.
Special Note: During the development of a Version 1.0 release, because it makes sense to have the single person with best understanding of the business case overseeing the development effort, in most cases it does NOT make sense to have one person overseeing the buildout of more than one product! The workload to understand business needs, positioning, usability needs, requirements and user stories, and implementation details is too great to split that person’s time into multiple threads. I can confirm this from personal experience!
ProdMgmtTalk: Product Manager vs. Product Owner
Mar 22nd
Today’s Global Product Management Talk, a weekly realtime Twitter conversation among product management professionals, covered the topic “To Agile or Waterfall…Does it Matter?” featured John Mansour, CEO of Agile Bench. As an agile product manager, I looked forward to this conversation despite that its timing at 6pm Eastern prevented me from participating realtime. The first posted question was “Product Manager, Agile Product Owner, What’s the Difference?” Since this is near and dear to my heart, I’ve composed my response here.
Some of the comments from the host that I found especially helpful included:
- agilebench: “Product Manager and Product Owner are two roles, sometimes occupied by the same person.”
- agilebench – PMs – outward (customer) facing. Channel, brand, price, the whole product. Strategic. POs – inward (project) facing. delivery, detail focused. Tactical.
The Problem: One huge problem is when one person tries to do both roles. From personal experience, I can confirm that especially with large-scope products in multi-national corporations with products in multiple silos, it’s practically and effectively impossible. Brainmates summarized the problem I experienced: “Market focus suffers, because it’s easier to work on tactical development activities.” In companies I’ve been exposed to, it was not only “easier,” but there were so many fires that there was really no choice. Because of the product’s complexity and the complexity of the organization (not to mention infighting and territorial-ism) there simply wasn’t enough time to participate in user story level design discussions, groom the backlog, coordinate sales and support, and simultaneously monitor the competition, research trends and pricing, and the other activities a business leader in the company should perform.
The Team Approach: As an alternative, agilebench suggested “can you find someone with product sympathies who can act as a proxy for you?” This echoes an approach I’ve seen becoming more commonly cited–including last week’s Technology Association of Georgia presentation by Mike Cottmeyer–of having a Product Owner Team. The team consists of a handful of roles that must be addressed: Product Manager handling the outward market-facing strategic functions, product owner acting as the development liason and sitting with the development team and driving home the detail around the user stories, and potentially a user experience analyst and others. Thus as Roger Cauvin proposed, “one model is that product management is more market facing, while product owner is more inward facing.”
NOTE: Another great read about a similar topic was recently posted to On Product Mangement.
The Balancing Act: One major concern about this approach is “too many cooks in the kitchen,” or not having a single point of authority on the product. I think the split approach can work, if and only if the members are diligent about remaining aligned on a daily basis. Another alternative is a balancing act: The PM/PO must be accessible to the team at all times, yet must get in front of customers and the other teams within the company to ensure a successful rollout. This balancing act can work if the team is talented and can work (at times!) without direct input from the product owner. A few calls and meetings spread through the week is one thing, but if the product owner is rarely visible except for the daily scrum, even a seasoned development team may be hard pressed to succeed. Conversely, if the product manager never leaves the scrum room to speak with customers, the team is at serious risk of building the wrong product “successfully”!
Two Pounds In a One Pound Bag: Given more than a full-time job’s worth of responsibilities outside the scrum room, and nearly another within, it should be inherently obvious that a product manager should not be placed in the impossible scenario of performing product manager and product owner responsibilities on two products at once! I can also confirm this from personal experience.
Other Topics: Other topics were discussed, including
- how to gain the respect of the development team
- how to break up deliverables when more than one product manager is on a single product
- when are agile methods not suitable for product management
- How do product managers ensure the vision when agile delivery teams are focused on small pieces of work?
- If it all needs to be done why does it need to be prioritized?
- How do you roll up individual projects into an org-wide roadmap aligned with company strategy?
Plenty of great discussion on all points is archived and available in PDF (start at the bottom!). Enjoy your read!
Thoughts on Agile Product Management
Feb 25th
A couple of thoughts/lessons about Agile product management were brought to my attention this week.
First, a former coworker expressed that he spends time with his developers when possible to get their input when writing requirements. While technical team input is certainly warranted, some of the primary benefits of agile are harvested only when the product owner sits in the “war room” with the development team during construction of the product. My former coworker expressed that he travels, so this arrangement is followed when possible.
In an agile organization, it may be that to account for a traveling, semi-available product manager–one who may be doing exactly what his product needs, spending time in the market–the best solution is to appoint a full-time product owner to the product. The product owner can spend time with the development team to make product decisions on a story-by-story basis, while the product manager is in the market, attending trade shows and visiting customers. If the two are able to stay in concert, the additional investment can pay off with a product that meets two very important goals:
- Being attuned to market needs,
- Constructed to meet the vision of the product’s evangelist.
For additional reading on this topic, start with Rich Mironov’s insightful slide deck entitled “Agile Product Manager, Agile Product Owner.”
Changing gears a bit, Roger Cauvin this week retweeted a link to his classic post titled “Agile is Not Just a Development Methodology.” In it, Roger posits that the benefits a product manager can obtain by working in an iterative, inspect-and-adapt process are perhaps more significant than the benefits a team obtains when developers work in this fashion. A product manager can use the input from customers and the “business at large” when planning each sprint, rather than constructing a complete set of requirements up front and hoping they’re still correct by the time construction has completed.
This is certainly motivation to support an agile development team, and can apply to monthly releases or initial releases. The flip side is that there are (at least) three types of initial product releases:
- Initial releases where a minimum marketable feature set must be constructed before release can occur.
- Initial releases where the marketability is more nebulous, and where realtime input is necessary to identify the point at which the product can be released to market.
- Ongoing releases where customer input is consumed regularly.
When entering a market in which established players exist and where speedy release to market with at worst a comparable product is the order of the day, the product manager may already have identified a minimum feature set that–reminiscent of waterfall processes–must be constructed in order for an offering to be at all viable. Going forward from that initial release, additional features to be added to the product can be vetted against real initial-release customer feedback as well as market needs. During initial construction, the product manager validates the original assumptions and concentrates on the user experience, to ensure the best possible initial release.
When entering other markets, customers can be brought in to evaluate each iteration and can help to determine when the problem is solved “well enough” to bring it to market. This mindset may be hard to achieve in a SaaS environment, where a monthly release schedule dictates that a release will go to market on a schedule. Teams may address this challenge in a couple of ways:
- Conducting work on solving the problem in each iteration and release, but not surfacing the functionality until the team decides it’s ready.
- Skipping a monthly release but still iterating, and releasing only when the feature is “ready for prime time.”
The third category, where a regular release schedule is maintained and customers are regularly consulted, is the most closely aligned with Roger’s position and is where agile product management can truly deliver the highest ROI.
Book Review: Agile Excellence for Product Managers
Jan 22nd
Agile Excellence for Product Managers by Greg Cohen is, in my view, the best introductory “how to and why” guide to Agile and Scrum for product managers available. There are other great resources touching on specific elements of methodology–such as Mike Cohn’s User Stories Applied–but Agile Excellence puts those techniques into context and explains the benefits of iterative development, the impact of iterative development on how the product manager conducts his activities and why it helps the product manager conduct those activities better than under a traditional development methodology.
Agile Excellence introduces the product manager to agile in a deliberate sequence. Starting with the benefits of iterative development, Cohen covers the specifics of Scrum and then gets into the details of release planning. In my experience, some teams try to “sprint through the backlog” without considering the contents of a specific release — the release planning chapter illustrates a technique for thinking this through to provide marketable value to customers over a series of iterations. To bring the product manager up to speed on writing requirements in the form of stories, Cohen goes into detail about user story management including the types of stories that exist and techniques for splitting the large ones. Examples are provided to illustrate when a story is too big to estimate granularly. This section is not nearly as comprehensive as Mike Cohn’s book, but it’s good enough to get started without lacking the basics.
Cohen shows how to move from ideation to a prioritized backlog, and how the team is able to deliver value to the business early and often by doing so. Agile Excellence walks through creation of a product strategy, followed by a release plan, creation of the product backlog, and finally estimation of the stories using the Planning Poker technique. With a team working on an estimated product backlog, Cohen considers how a product manager interacts with the team and with the business at large (including customers), and discusses signs of trouble and how to react. Finally, for context, Cohen spends a bit of time on XP and Lean development including Kanban.
One of the important points Cohen makes is that Agile and Scrum are essentially a project management approach rather than a development methodology. Development teams need to adopt new techniques to meet the tight deadlines agile demands, but these techniques are not elements of agile. Agile simply assumes the team is “self-organizing” and will make the changes necessary to succeed. The fact that those changes often include pair programming and test-driven-development is left to the development team to discover, however it is useful for a product manager to be aware of them in the event they are evangelizing agile to an organization.
I highly recommend this title for product managers new to agile, and to those needing a refresher. This book puts agile techniques in context, gives enough “in the weeds” level detail, and explains why these techniques are useful and why they make a difference. It’s the book I wish I’d read before beginning to work with a scrum team.
The Product Owner Vision
Jan 2nd
A recent article by David Alfaro summarizes well the core competency of a product owner in scrum / agile development organizations — the ability to consume all the inputs, mix them together and design a cohesive, marketable product that will meet the needs expressed in the inputs. Not surprisingly, this sounds a lot like product management. Here’s how Alfaro expresses this core skill:
After you have listened to all the aforementioned stakeholders the following two hardest steps are ahead: 1) Synthesize all that input into something really remarkable, feasible to implement and affordable for customers. 2) Communicate that synthesis to stakeholders and team in order to go for it.
There are (at least) two major views of this. Design-driven organizations would likely agree with Alfaro, perhaps with the added input and agreement of a design team (artists and interaction designers) on the front side to craft the behavior of the desired product. Others that take a more “agile” approach may guide the product owner to focus on the problems, presenting them to the team in the form of stories and allowing the team to design the solution within a pre-determined set of parameters.
Either way, the product owner’s job is to define with more or less granularity the “what,” and to guide the team to analyze and implement the “how.”