Agile Software Development

Last week I managed to take part in a widely recognized product management course (special thanks to my line manager Mika Hoikkala who found it useful for the company to finance my long-haul trip). I am coming from the engineering/Agile world and one of the main points for me was to figure out what my new role was really about, whether it is more, less or equal to Scrum Product Owner (PO). The course was useful in this regard and here are my findings.

The course wasn't linked to any particular methodology, but whenever the methodology was relevant, agile methods were deemed as more effective. Still the parallels with Scrum in this post are my personal opinion, rather than what has been taught on the course.

Product Manager

Product Manager is a role to care about not even a product itself, but about particular problems of the market or market segment. It includes tactical activities, such as doing presentations and strategic activities, such as market research and competitive analysis; technical activities such as figuring out the release milestones and not so technical activities such as product positioning. Product Manager is a role linking sales, marketing and development, a role supposed to stand strongly in the what domain, hunt for facts and stay out of the how part as much as possible.

Update: this topic continues at Product Manager and Scrum Product Owner.

This Saturday I am leaving for the US-based course on Product Management. So I thought it could be a good idea to share my thoughts on the difference between the product management and the Agile Product Owner (Scrum) or Customer (XP) role.

Background

I come from software development. I was an engineer, system analyst, engineer again, senior engineer and chief engineer of the department for a decade. During last several years I was learning and practicing Agile and especially Scrum as a local consultant, evangelist, propagandist and Scrum Master. As permanent readers might remember earlier this year I moved to Product Management hoping to be able to help with the effective prioritization issues and Product Manager position seemed to be the easiest path for playing the Scrum Product Owner role. I indeed became a co-Product Owner for a development team. However, naturally I started spending some time on figuring out the "general Product Management" as well.

It is now official. Since the beginning of the year I moved from the Chief Engineer role in a department doing speech recognition and synthesis to product management in the my company internal tools department.

Reasons

For the last couple of years I was more, than full-time focused on making the agile software development methods work for our team, our company and myself (heavy amount of practical scrum mastering and teaching included). It was a fascinating story full of learning, excitement and success though not without some failures and disappointment. I still believe that at the moment Agile and Lean Thinking are one of the top topics many SW development organizations should invest into.