Agile Mashup

In my last blog Agile antipattern: Taking on large stories I said I would give you some tips on how to split stories.  First though, it is important to understand WHY splitting a story well can be helpful.  It is about much more than just making smaller stories.  In fact, making smaller stories may be the least [...]

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3. Ten Ways to Improve Your Planning Poker Results People who promote the use of Planning Poker understand some of the main…

Uncategorized Development, Practices, Product Management, Tips

In this audio interview I speak with the author of the blog Purist Product Management: Aziz Musa. I had the opportunity to work with Aziz for a year at Reed Business Information and found him to be an inspirational and focussed product manager. During the interview I review Aziz’s:

Uncategorized Product Management, Your Career

As you may know, I am editing a series of books for Addison-Wesley, my long-time publisher. Authors in the series are all going to be sharing early drafts of chapters and soliciting feedback. Two authors are far enough along that they have made initial chapters available.
Roman Pichler is writing about the product owner role in [...]

Agile Testing Addison Wesley, agile books, agile game development, agile product management, Books, Chapters Books, Cto, Draft Chapter, Draft Chapters, Feedback, Fifteen Years, Game Development, Game Studio, Initial Chapters, Lisa Crispin, Long Time, New Books, Pichler, Practical Guide, Product Management, Scrum, Time Publisher, Upcoming Books, Winning Products

Lessons from a Silicon Valley Innovator by Rich Mironov

This book compiles some of Rich’s most popular columns from 2002 to 2008. It includes thoughts on building and maintaining product organizations, understanding how customers think, ideas for how to price new products, and ways to motivate people who don’t work for you. Collected into a single volume, it paints a picture of a typical interrupt-driven day.

Rich Mironov is a software product strategist and veteran of four high-tech startups. He is currently Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of Enthiosys, a product strategy consultancy headquartered in Silicon Valley, where he advises technology companies ranging from F100 to pre-funded startups. Rich is considered an expert on software product management and mar¬keting with a focus on business strategy, pricing and market analysis.
The five key section are:

1. Falling in Love
2. Organizing your Organization
3. The almost New – New thing
4. Getting into the Customers Head
5. What Should Things Cost

Rich draws analogy between being a parent (and at times a first time parent) and product management – an analogy that I used to describe the difference between product management and project management.

The book promises to be a good read for product managers who are working for start ups and for large corporate organisations – click here to purchase the book from Amazon or here to read more about Rich and his book The art of Product Management.

Uncategorized Product Development, Product Management, Product Manager

Uncategorized Developers, Engineers, Product Management

Pragmatic marketing’s management team wrote a book “Tuned In” which gives 6 steps on how to create successful products and services - something that sits at the centre of every product manager’s job. In short the 6 steps are…

Step 1 Find unresolved problems – how do we know what markets, products, features to focus on.
Step 2 Understand buyers’ personas – identify who will buy your offering.
Step 3 Quantify the impact – how do we know if you have a potential killer app?
Step 4 Create breakthrough experiences – how do you build competitive advantage?
Step 5 Articulate powerful ideas – how do you establish memorable concepts that speak to the problems buyers have?
Step 6 Final step in the tuned in process is creating a resonator – viral marketing - products and features that people will want to talk about, buy and recommend.

Future post will comment on each post.

Uncategorized Business case, Product Management, Product Manager

In his article, Innovating in Large Companies, Marty Cagan highlights the fact that many successful companies allow their engineers to spend 20% of the time on innovative projects of their choice. Marty encourages companies to allow Product Managers as well as engineers to spend 20% of their time innovating. Why is this a good idea?
– Because many successful products come from the bottom up rather than the top down.

Tim Brown, in his Harvard Business Review article, stresses that innovation comes through observations, observing how people use current products - what products could help them do their jobs better.

Marty in the same article reminds us “that innovation is rarely about solving an entirely new problem. More often it is solving an existing problem in a new way. So watching people struggle with their existing solutions is a great way to highlight innovation opportunities.”

Good product managers, according to Jeff Lash, do not just gather requirements — they understand unmet needs, existing problems, and opportunities for improvement, and they then use that information to determine the requirements for the product.

So what are the characteristics of innovative Product Management? Tim Brown identifies five attributes that can be applied to a Product Manager:

1. The Product Manage has EMPATHY: that’s to say they have the ability to image the world from multiple perspectives, they put people first, they notice things that others miss and use their insight to inspire others.
2. The innovative Product Manager is an INTEGRATIVE THINKER they use analytical processes along with their ability see all the key points and the things that seem to contradict aspects of a problem. They use novel solutions to solve existing and/or emerging problems.
3. Product Managers must be OPTIMISTIC they have an inbuilt believeth that there will be a solution to any given problem.
4. EXPERIMENTALISM: The PM understands that significant innovations don’t come about from small incremental tweaks.
5. COLLABRATION: Product Mangers work along side many people with different disciplines and also have more than one discipline themselves.
The innovative Product Manager adds value through observation, insight and understanding.

Related articles:
Successful Product Managers collaborate to ensure innovative product development
How Product Managers can avoid innovation traps #part 1
How Product Managers can avoid the innovation trap #part2
The innovation Value Chain and Product Management

Uncategorized Innovation, Product Management, Product Manager

It’s been over a year since the product management team went on a series of agile/scrum training courses. The transformation and associated challenges over the past 14 months have been quite interesting. Here’s a report on the journey, progress, issues encountered and experiences to date.

Product Management Prior to Scrum
Before agile working practices where adopted the Product Managers role consisted of a lot of short term tactical wins coupled with continual fire fighting. All this resulted in Product Managers being more reactive to situation as opposed to being proactive in delivering new products to market and improving on developing the feature set of their current product portfolio.

How Scrum was Implemented
The philosophy of agile was presented, by the IS Director and Head of Web Solutions Group - Kelly Waters (author of the blog ‘all about agile software development’), over a 3 month period to various committees, steering groups and forums in order to get the by-in from Managing Directors and Publishing Directors.

External trainers where also brought in and presented, to the MDs and the heads of Business Development and e-Marketing, the issues that companies face with software development and how agile/scrum could address the challenges we were currently experiencing.

Agile/Scrum Training
On-line Product Managers, Web Editors and Business Owners spent a few days on a scrum master and product owner’s training course. All Product Managers had a strong idea of the rudiments of scrum and a few where practicing elements of it. The training helped consolidate the principles of scrum within the Product Management team and helped gel a common high level theoretical understanding of the principles and vocabulary of scrum.

Problems and Issues
The real battle started after the training. Whilst some business owners embraced scrum others where less than reluctant to adopt or get involved. A number of open meetings were set up, with the Product management team, where business stakeholders were free to ask questions and engage in an open debate regarding the pros and cons of adopting the new way of working. Product Managers also worked on a 1-to-1 basis to evangelize the benefits and to secure and maintain buy-in. Fortunately the Managing Directors fully supported the principles of agile – so inevitably business stakeholders eventually freed up time in their daily schedules to attend the 10 to 15 minutes stand ups each morning and a few afternoons every 15 days to participate in pre-planning, planning, reviews and retrospective meetings.

Identifying and Solving Problems
Implementing scrum did not solve all the company’s problems but went a long way to identifying many of them.

Problems with releases:
Increase in the frequency of releases identified bottlenecks in the resources used/alocated to carry out releases.

Managing the release problem
The Lead Product Manager’s implemented a ‘scrum of scrum’ where releases are put on a white board and at 4.30 every afternoon a Lead Product Manager or the Development Manger meets with the Product Managers who want to release the following day in order to set the release priorities based on business value.

Problems with Agile Testing
Test Analysts found it a challenge adapting to agile – I ran a few sessions with the Web Solutions Group Management team and all the Test Analyst from across the department. Many issues where down to a change in test working practices. No longer did the Testers have a fully documented technical and functional spec to work with. Read Part # 7 Points to watch out for when converting from waterfall to agile testing for more details

Solving the Agile Test Problem
The Test Analyst were sent on Scrum Master training courses, the Analyst aspect of the Test function was highlighted and the Test Analyst are now given the formal responsibility for gathering and documenting the test cases during pre-planning. The test cases are presented to the customer(s) during the planning meeting in order to get their formal feedback and sign-off. This has formed part of us adopting agile engineering practices and therefore test driven development.

Return on Investment (ROI) and improvement in quality using Scrum
Just prior to implement scrum I had finished managing a project (re-design of a B2B website). Six months afterwards I worked on another redesign of a B2B website that was more feature rich and technically challenging. However this time I used scrum to manage the project the number of man hours was reduced by 35% and went live with 3 known minor/low bugs – with in 2 hours of launching we discovered 2 bugs that did no show up in our test or UAT environments – both bugs where fixed within a matter or hours.

Product Management Post Scrum
Implementing scrum has resulted in Product Managers being able to be more proactive and think and act longer term. Sure there are still issues with fire fighting and predicting the exact date and time of a release - however the overall negative situation has diminished considerably since the organisation has embraced agile working practices. The profile and trust of the Product Management team has also increased – many act as proxy product owners and are involved in defining features and working along side business owners in making decisions, identifying opportunities to improve the product feature set and advising business stakeholders on a host of different tactical and strategic issues. See:
Part #9 The role of the Product Manager in Scrum
and
What is the job of a typical on-line Product Manager?

Ironically the few business stakeholders who where sceptical about embracing agile are now some of its greatest exponents .

Scrum Agile, Product Management, Product Manager, ROI, Stakeholders, Test Analyst, Waterfall

Traditionally when I think of the job of the product manager I think of someone who is half marketing and half engineer – someone who is 50% orientated towards business needs and 50% orientated towards technology. People who have this mixture hold a number of different job titles: product manager, product marketing manager, product development manager… and so on. There are many papers and blog post that explain the differences between these job roles and functions e.g. Product Management vs. Product Marketing. From my point of view your job title and function depends a lot on the type of company your working for and the industry you’re in.

I wrote a blog post a few months ago about Product Management moving into IT/IS departments. This should not come as a surprise since the Product Manager is essentially a bridge between business and market needs and technology – (be it hardware, software or a combination of the two) - and the talented individuals who dedicate their lives researching, designing and building technical products. Many SME and organisations e.g. Banks rely on information technology to gain the competitive advantage hence the investment in product management to ensure that technology constantly delivers business value and therefore the competitive edge.

Tim O’Reilly states that: “Technology is fundamentally transforming publishing.” In the same article entitled Tools for change conference he continues by saying that:
“There is so much that publishers need to know: how to effectively apply new Web 2.0 concepts like harnessing collective intelligence, loosely coupled web services, tag clouds, and mashups; content generation technologies like blogs, wikis, and crowdsourcing; content management systems; production workflows for XML publishing; real time data analysis driving publishing decisions; new presentation layer tools like Ajax (and the latest from Adobe, like Apollo); search engine optimization….”

Taking all this into consideration it’s no wonder that Product Managers have arrived at online media companies, bridging the gap between the publishing business and technology teams. Marie Griffen says in her article Product Managers Arrive that:
“The Internet is a constantly evolving technology, not simply a delivery platform for content in electronic form. It requires the creation of new jobs within media companies, and one area that is on the rise is online product management.”

The article goes on to say that: “At Penton Media, the product manager function is well-developed. “Product managers marry market needs with the core competencies in our technology group,” said Prescott Shibles, VP of Penton Media “s new media group.

I’ve been working as a Product Manager for Reed Business Information (the world biggest B2B publishing company) for 3 years – prior to that I had worked for in Project Management and Product Management for two different technology companies who designed and manufactured products for the broadcast industry. Comparing the two different Product Management roles I would say that the technologies, of course, differ. Also in the online world your loyalty is shared between at least 3 different types of customers: the advertiser and/or sponsor, the end user and the search engine/google(bot) as opposed to just a single customer who was generally the end user. Apart from that the fundamental functional differences in Product Management are minimal. The key differences lie in the area of work flow and processes - however this can also vary between companies with in the same industry.

So if your looking for a challenge and a change in your product management career I would highly recommend transferring your skill set and working for an online media company.

The current transition the publishing world is experiencing is akin to the transition the broadcast industry went through when it moved from analogue to digital or to put it in consumer terms the transition from having limited TV channels with analogue to have unlimited channels with digital TV or the move from vinyl to CD – as with all changes some will embrace while other will get left behind.

Product Management is not just here to stay its growing fast and gaining ground. Where ever there are business problems and commercial needs (be it B2B/B2C online publishing or re- purposing adverts in wide screen format for television or producing films in HD for the cinema) the product managers ultimate goal is to utilize technology to produce products to solve the problems and meet the market needs in a profitable way.

Uncategorized Product Management, Product Manager, Technology, Your Career

Where do you, as the Product Manager, see yourself in three years time?
I always find this question challenging: the pace of product management and technology is moving so fast that it would be quite difficult to predict where or what today’s product manager would be doing in three or five years time. However here are a few thoughts that may help you answer the question and put you on track for a prolonged and fruitful career as Product Manager
Stress on seeing yourself as a successful Product Manager
I’ve always liked this quote from Allan R Cohen book “The portable MBA in Management”
“…the meaning of success has also changed for most people. No longer do people think of success in terms only in vertical terms (for example in terms of promotions). Increasingly, people define success in their own terms, measured against their own particular set of gaols and values in life. We call this psychological success. The good thing about success from the individuals point of view is while there is only one way to achieve vertical success (that of moving up), there are an infinite variety of ways of achieving psychological success.”

• Becoming or continuing to master a range of technologies that are applicable to his/her market and product.
• To be known as the Product Manager that successfully launched a number of innovative products into the market place.
• Broadening your product portfolio and entering new markets.
• Taking on more responsibilities and mentoring junior product managers

Achieving the above and being formally recognised for it is also known as lateral promotion acording to Promoting to a new employer
“The lateral promotion is where, because of your increased knowledge, skills or experience, you earn more pay but do not get a managerial position. Many companies have realised over the past decade that one way to keep their personnel happy is not to make them supervisor, manager, partner or vice president, but to pay them better for being good at what they do. It’s a simple way of rewarding - and keeping - valuable employees without putting extra strain or a new life on them.”

It’s important not to give the impression (or have the idea) that you’re using the company only as a stepping stone to becoming the “Head of Product Management” or promoted to being the “Group Product Manager.”
Be sure to persuade the interviewer that you are able and ready to add value to the company and the product range(s) you will be managing before you give any impression on having a desire to climb the corporate ladder.

Uncategorized interview, Product Management, Product Manager, Your Career