Getting to the Top in Product Marketing and Product Management

I came across this video on Youtube and found it quite inspiring so I thought it was worth sharing.  The introduction on what is product management/marketing is quite succinct and bang on target.

Many of the points resonated with me especially the frequent referrals to the importance of the customer in developing your product offering.  Hope you enjoy :-).

Meet the Product Manager

What do you do when you’re a product manager (for web applications and tools) who has started a new job, assigned to an existing team who are just about to embark on the development of a range of new products and product features? We’ll whatever the correct answer is, this is what I have started to do. The first step I took was to access the situation and give the team the opportunity to voice their opinion.


I soon realized in my first week in my new role as product manager that there was plenty of scope to improve a number of aspects of the product development process. We are currently using a hybrid of Scrum and waterfall (the logic behind this will form the basis of a later blog post). I waited for all the team members’ to return from their holidays before holding a team meeting that I tagged “meet the product manager”.

I introduced myself as a product manager who ‘eats their own dog food’ – in other words I’m an actively user of online tools, blooging platforms, social media and networking sites.

I also took the opportunity to let them know the things (from a professional perspective) that I’m passionate about:

• All things to do with Product Management/Marketing.
• Working with engineering/development teams and cross functional teams.
• Agile software development particularly, scrum.
• Creating strategy & visions and driving them through all the stages to completion.

The things that I’m not passionate about – in fact the things that we should, as a team, avoid at all cost. See the familiar cartoon strip below.

I followed this with a case study: comparing two redesign projects that I wasthe  product manager for – one using waterfall which had a shared test resource and the other using scrum with a dedicated test resource. The results were alarming. The waterfall project took +60% more man hours and went live with 100 plus small and medium bugs, whilst the redesign, that was developed using scrum, went live with 4 known minor bugs. I used this experience not only to demonstrate my active involvement in scrum but to illustrate the type of transformational product development we can achieve if we work closely together and use the scrum frame work wisely.

I highlighted that as the Scrum product owner I would initially be spending a lot of my time and energy  over the next 4 to 8 weeks, developing: in conjunction with the business owners, commercial owners and other senior stakeholders, the product strategy, product roadmap and release plan - the end result being a backlog with at least 6 to 18 months worth of work in it. Naturally the backlog would need constant grooming as coarse grain items become high priority.  I would also naturally be on hand on a day to day basis to support the team and remove any commercial and business impediments whilst the scrum master will be removing the technical impediments.

I then handed out post it notes and ask the team to write on each note their likes and dislikes and also to introduce themselves e.g. where they’ve previously worked, what they’re passionate about, hobbies and interests…

One of the key messages message that the scrum training drummed home to me when I was first trained on the scrum framework was that scrum does not solve problems it only identifies them. However scrum, if practiced appropriately, will make change and tracking and tracking the results of change much easier. Here are the top three likes and dislikes the developers highlighted.

Dislikes:

1. No dedicated test full time test analyst, no automated test tools & the team failing to carry out unit testing and code reviews.
2. Changing requirements /scope creep causing work to be either wasted or having to be reworked.
3. Opinions of the team not always being embraced when it comes to decisions on functionality

Likes:

1. Knowledge sharing among the team – experience and ideas are traded freely.
2. The fact that we use scrum/agile – the team liked all aspects of scrum especially the ability to select tasks on a daily basis.
3. Product Manager being part of the team as opposed to being absent (note complement was aimed at the interim contract product manager cum technical team leader).

My job as product owner aka product manager in conjunction with the scrum master aka technical team lead – is to ensure that the team is empowered to change those things that we have the power to change. Understand and communicate the reasoning behind the things that we can’t change and be patient with the things that will take time to change.

I said to at the beginning of this blog post that the first thing was to access the situation and give the team the opportunity to share their thoughts – the second thing I’ll do (and publish the results in a future blog post) is to survey the team to see how mature they are with regards to practicing scrum.

Combining Classical and Agile Product Management

I was asked to present, at an interview, on how I see the role of the product manager working in an agile scrum environment. The key areas that I highlighted were:

• Scope and responsibilities of the product manager in scrum
• Typical product management activities in scrum
• A typical day in the life of the agile product manager
• The agile product management framework
• A case study – the benefits
• See full presentation below.

However since the interview/presentation and starting in the new role the company has decided to change direction and combine waterfall with scrum. The idea is that we start off in waterfall mode move into scrum and then finish in waterfall.

Since joining the first thing I noticed was that the current scrum team is being led (as opposed to the team self managing itself) by a contract technical team lead cum product manager who spends part of his time being the scrum master and part being a business analysis.

In order to bring clarity and set expectations from the start I went about working with the head of development and head of product management to define, at a real granular level, the scope of the product manager aka product owner and that of the scrum master who is currently the technical team lead.

The end result was a list of 90+ activities: starting off with documenting the product vision and ending in the release of a sprint. The activities combine classical product management with agile product management – a real hybrid taking the best of both worlds. The roles and responsibilities matrix was signed off by both heads – now the journey begins.

Next week I meet with the development in order to explore the journey we’ll take together in developing the products allocated to us.

How I See The Role Of Product Management

View more presentations from Derek Morrison.