How to be THE ULTIMATE Agile Product Team / Agile Product Managers and Agile Product Owners Living Together in Harmony
Posted on November 8, 2008
Filed Under Articles | 5 Comments
Forgive me team, but it’s been a while since my last post. My last blog was posted before I started applying agile methods within a new team. I’ve been enjoying the posts from enthiosys, and Dean Leffingwell’s Scaling Software Agility blogs, and sharing them with my product team. It’s interesting, as many of you touched on “when to adopt the Product Owner role.” There’s no perfect answer (budgets usually preside), except to adopt the attributes, and to grow the role as the company grows. As you can expect, there’s been some lively discussions within my own Product Management/Engineering teams as well. Now that we’re maturing, and IMHO “qualifying” as a real agile team, I’d like to share some of my experiences with applying Agile Product Ownership, and Agile Product Management within our organization, in an effort to become THE ULTIMATE Agile Product Team.
First, I’d like to step back to the ever-evolving definition of the Agile Product Manager (APM) and the Agile Product Owner (APO).
The following chart is a super-set of data that I’ve compiled from a few articles noted here. This chart defines the attributes that resonate with APO/APM roles that I’ve held:
| Agile Product Manager (APM) attributes | Agile Product Owner (APO) attributes |
| Tracks industry trends | Tracks internal cadence and deliveries |
| Defines release objectives | Defines iteration objectives |
| Provides overall strategic direction | Provides day-to-day tactical direction |
| Delivers business level use cases or stories | Provides system level use case or story elaboration |
| Has a solid understanding of current solutions | Has an understanding of architectural component and subsystem design |
| Defines external roadmaps | Defines user acceptance tests |
| Manages release and portfolio priorities and backlogs | Manages the iteration and cross project priorities |
| Manages the changing needs of the market and customer base | Unblocks and focuses the portfolio or feature teams throughout the iteration |
| Manages market messaging and positioning | Manages defect scheduling |
| Provides the overall vision | Provides the implementation |
| Lives in Marketing | Lives in Engineering |
| Communicates daily with the Product Owner (shares a brain with the PO) | Communicates daily with the Product Manager (shares a brain with the PM) |
| Delivers The Release | Delivers The Iteration |
While these are not concise nor deep definitions of what the APM/APO roles are, I will elaborate on how the cadence of an Agile organization alone helps drive the need for this separation of roles. I discuss our cadence and need below.
Before I move to cadence, I touched on the timing of growing of adopting Product Owners. In my current organization, there was an immediate need for a Product Owner. At first, it was called the “Agile Project Manager”. Regardless of the title, the role was the same. At the time, we had one Product Manager, who was completely overloaded. He was out of the office 80% of the time gaining valuable customer and market feedback on a new product. When he was in the office, the remaining 20% of the time did not account for direct collaboration with the development teams. The product development suffered in many ways: lack of story elaboration, lack of iteration prioritization, softness of iteration boundaries and cadence, etc, etc. So, the Project Manager (aka: APO), organically took on the role and attributes of Agile Product Owner, and immediately helped the team stay focused and deliver the iteration.
As our product portfolio grew, so did our product management team, and inherently, the need for product ownership grew as well. However, as mentioned above, budget doesn’t always allow for a 1 to 1 APM to APO role, so we quickly “grew” product owners within the portfolio solution teams that participate and communicate up through the Scrum of Scrums and other daily scrums. These Product Owners shared roles with Sr. Software Developers, System Engineers, and Project Managers. Regardless of the title, the role was required, and the team stepped up to deliver some of the Product Owner attributes and tasks as defined above. Below is a snapshot of our engineering cadence and communication channels that fostered the agile growth:
You can see that the 1 week cadence alone drove the agile best practice of constant collaboration and communication. With this market-driven cadence, there’s absolutely NO WAY an Agile Product Manager can balance their strategic external dependencies with the daily needs of the development team, and still be effective at their own external facing role (as effectively voiced by the Cranky Product Manager). (I Love Cranky PMs) This engineering cadence allowed for and “forced” the product deliveries necessary to maintain market leadership. Having both APMs (when they can) and APOs (mandatory) at these meetings fosters the mind-meld required to drive at a sustainable agile speed.
This looks logical, right? However logical it may seem, creating the Ultimate Product Team does not come without emotional challenges of adopting, coaching, and nurturing this high-performing teams. Past processes, roles, and behaviors do not change overnight, and people are not always willing to change their behaviors to accommodate a “supportive and holistic team-based approach” to delivering product. Here are some tips I’ve learned to effectively integrate the APO/APM roles into becoming The Ultimate Product Team.
Collaboration – Create an iteration cadence that supports daily collaboration. Allow for all meetings on the engineering cadence to be “Open Door”. Product Management will be selective in choosing the scrums or meetings that mean the most to them at the time. If Product Management cannot attend, Product Owners should summarize high-points in an email or minutes. Minutes should be posted to the Wiki of choice so that anyone can easily catch up.
Partnership – Partnership between APMs and APOs are requisite. One partnership tactic I use is to constantly ask my Product Managers; “How can I help?” For the most part, this tactic works well, and Product Managers are more than willing to take you up on it in a heartbeat. Go out for coffee once a week. Meet after stand-ups for a few moments to see if anything stood out as needing attention. Synchronize and communicate the ever-changing corporate priorities daily. Feel free to pop into each other’s cube/office whenever you need to
Trust – The true foundation of building your ultimate team is to trust your colleagues and APM/APO partners to make the right decision. Be forewarned, that your APM/APO partner will sometimes make a decision that is opposite of yours. Both parties must always understand the priorities. Stand behind each other, and support each other’s decisions, so that teams know you are both empowered, and can be trusted to have the same overall business decisions and authority.
Try implementing just a few of these techniques into your organization as you adopt and grow your own Ultimate Agile Product Team.
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5 Responses to “How to be THE ULTIMATE Agile Product Team / Agile Product Managers and Agile Product Owners Living Together in Harmony”
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[...] and Product Owners Posted on November 9, 2008 by Dean Leffingwell In a recent post, How to be the Ultimate Agile Product Team, Jennifer Fawcett opines on the evolving roles of agile project managers, agile product managers [...]
Good capture of in-the-field experience generalized for other readers. Thanks for pushing our thinking along.
This is an excellent and unique article on Agile, in fact, I’ve never seen this topic covered before.
I am interested in republishing this article on PM Hut. Please email me back or contact me through the “Contact Us” form on the PM Hut site in case you’re OK with this.
[...] How to be THE ULTIMATE Agile Product Team [Agile Product Owner] [...]
ifer:
good article. It’s nice to see the agile product management community converge in what was a heated topic (product owner vs. product manager) a year ago when we presented a webinar on the subject. BTW – your readers may enjoy the updated webinar content available at
http://www.rallydev.com/downloads/product_management.html which is inline with your thinking and Enthiosys’s.
If I may, I would suggest replacing in your APM vs APO table, “provides the implementation” with “owns the iteration user stories”, as I think product owners should leave the implementation details to the creativity of developers.
Happy New Year and Go Fairview Knights