Product Management - the Agile Balancing Act

Think-tank at SPA2006

Thanks to all who contributed to this session! The session presentation is available at

	http://www.davethehat.com/spa2006/ProductManagementPresentation.pdf

and the position paper (also in the conference documentation) at

	http://www.davethehat.com/spa2006/ProductManagementPaper.pdf

The major outputs of the session were job descriptions and role profiles for a product manager. These were developed by mining stories of project successes and failures for key points, which then suggested characteristics for both the role and the person performing it (see the presentation for a full description of the process and the brainstorming technique used)

For the Job Description, the four categories in which we identify requirements for the role are:

• Goals - what are the deliverables of the person in the role
• Responsibilities - what responsibility and authority does the individual have
• Activities - what are the day-to-day activities that will achieve the goals
• Context - What is the organisational, social and technological context of the position

For the personal profile, the categories are:

• Character - particular character and personal traits
• Skills - required skill for the role
• Experience - what will the individual bring to the role
• Circumstance - such as ability to travel, work remotely and so on

Note that each group was preparing a description for the job in a particular project (which might have been one of the stories, or which might have been a composite of these) - so one can generalise from (say) the skill requirement of "Financial skills" in Group A's personal profile to "user domain skills" in any.

As this was a think tank, we kept the teams under tight - extreme even - time pressure. Looking at the outputs, I think with more time the material might have ended up better organised (for example, there are several cases where a characteristic is, it seems to me, misplaced - a skill under the expereince section, for example). However, at this stage we've not changed any of the outputs (editorial additions are in [brackets]).

The outputs of each group are summarised below:

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Group A

Job description

Goals

• Identify:
  • target market/customers (find a first customer to use as an example)
  • appropriate release cycles
• Deliver product which customers want
• Meet sales target

Responsibilities

• Act as a translator (translate customer desires into product requirements)
• Ensure exec/org sponsorship of product
• Understand the domain
• First - can we do it? Can we sell it?
• Own the business case

Activities

• Meet customers
• Find a dev team lead
• Talk/answer/listen to dev team
• Control features included in the product
• Take decisions about priority
• Maintain product roadmap
• Create customer advisory system

Context

• Implement a strategy
• Domain experts
• Requires [organisational] backing/support
• Understand the domain
• Maintain relationship with regulatory bodies

Personal profile

Character

• Decisive and takes the lead
• Having own opinion
  • High threshold before losing temper
  • Diplomatic
  • Facilitator/mediator
• Open-minded
• High Committment
• Visionary

Skills

• Communicate at various levels
• Financial background
• "Honest" sales skills
• Public speaking (conferences, customer presentations, etc)
• Understands development process/able to fit proper developmen methodology to team at hand

Experience

• Exposure to domain/domain knowledge
• Project lifecycle experience

Circumstance

• Able to travel
• Multicultural

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Group B

Job description

Goals

• Get as many students as possible onto the course
  • Attractive course materials
• Give students a happy experience
• Make the most of resources available
• Balance the books
• Produce a successful course to last 6 years

Responsibilities

• Find out what users want/need/will pay for
• Control of finances
• There is a single line being followed consistently
• Keep schedule on track
• Keep everyone happy :-)
• Manage customer experience
• See where the product fits in the wider university provision

Activities

• Gather and analyse course feedback
  • Coordinate academic content
  • Give a clear direction to the vision of the courses
• Liaise between stakeholders
  • Direct the production of materials
  • Market research
• Develop future plans
  • Manage budget for the course product

Context

• Academic team
• Material design/production team
• Authority [University and statutory? DH]
• Effective interface to customers

Personal profile

Character

• Calm
• Pragmatic
• Leader
• Authority
• Visionary

Skills

• Diplomacy
• Don't get bogged down in details [Perspective]
• Budgeting
• Person management
• Planning
• Marketing
• Ability to integrate ideas

Experience

• Publishing (in broad sense)
• Teacher
• Writer?
• Some experience of "Business"

Circumstance

• [none offered]

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Group C

Job description

Goals

• Project success
• Product success
• Business benefit [realised]
• Develop/deploy/operate :: Long-term oversight
• Ensure product meets customer requirements
• How to do better next time :: continuous improvement

Responsibilities

• Represent customer to dev team
• Ensure project visibility
• Uncover/capture requirements
• Ensure project is resourced
• Prioritising requirements
• Quality assurance
• Financial responsibility

Activities

• Talking to customers
• Brainstorm scenarios
• Run human simulation [!! DH]
  • Use UI mock-ups
• Develop measurements/metrics
• Hold [organise? DH] retrospectives
• Liaise with :: marketing, account mgr [sales], customer, tech lead and proj mgr
• Workshop requirements
• Communication
• Play planning game with dev team
• Prioritise requirements

Context

• Budget [organisational constraint]
  • What is the cost if this doesn't work
  • Resource limitations
• Large number of stakeholders
• Business case
• Multi-project environment
• Incomplete specification
• Changing technologies
• Willing test "victims"

Personal profile

Character

• Flexible
• Credible
• Empathic
• Confident
• Self-motivated
• Monitor/evaluator
• Facilitator
• Passionate, committed
• Open
• Super-human!

Skills

• Understanding and prioritisation of requirements
• Negotiation
• Planning, time management, multi-tasking
• Facilitation
• Business awareness
• Political awareness [clearly in the context of the business :-) DH]
• Technically literate
• Software development methodologies
• Agile processes

Experience

• Large project management
  • Software team management
  • Multiple project management
• Risk analysis
• Customer-facing role
  • Domain knowledge
  • Business analysis
• Organisational excellence
• IT background (development or infrastructure)
• Workshops
• Sales

Circumstance

• Available
• Willing to work for small company

---

Group D

Job description

Goals

• Value/cost [i.e. maximise value divided by cost DH]
• One voice
• Profitable product
• Product flies off the shelf
• Make money now and in future
• Visibility to stakeholders

Responsibilities

• Inspire confidence in direction
• Defend ("cage") project
• Keep things moving
• Balance past/now/future
• Consensus
• Feedback
• Prioritise features
• Know what will sell
• Identify customers unfelt wants

Activities

• Prioritise
• Backlog
• Have ideas
• Facilitate ideas
• Sell ideas
• Get funding for development
• Organise regular status meetings
• Talk to customers at all levels

Context

• The truth is out there
• Access to sales
• Reliability
• Paid by results?

Personal profile

Character

• Approachable
• Visionary
• Creative
• Positive/optimist/enthusiast
• Patient
• Exploratory

Skills

• Organisational skills
• Negotiation
• Personal relationships
• Communication
• Knowledge of different markets
• Deal with different/appripriate parties
• Generalist
• Abstraction/synthesise
• Leaps tall buildings with a single bound

Experience

• Understanding of customer base/domain/market
• Has done sales
• Understands software development

Circumstance

• Not a part-time role
• Available >80% working hours
• Can travel

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I'm [DH] completely sold on the brainstorming [http://www.direct-quotes.com |insurance quotes]technique we introduced here. An aside - http://www.online-phentermine.com there's a subtle geometric/semantic thing going on in the choice of the four categories for the grid, and their placement - top-bottom, left-right - that merits further thought.

However, on further reflection, it strikes me that we probably didn't do a great job of explaining the categorisations. We'd though of Responsibilities and Context (in the job description grid) as being pretty closely defined - responsibilities with respect to budgets, teams and artefacts, context around the position of the role in the organisation. So:

	goal = what the PM achieves; 
	responsibilities = what the PM is given to achieve the goal;
	activities = what they do to achieve it;
	context = the structure and constraints in which they work.

Though some of the work ended up more focussed, there's still a tendency in some of this to envisage a kind of superhero customer-sponsor-project manager who'll do all and everything to ensure the success of a project, rather than someone who works in a larger organisational context and with an agile development team to guide and participate product development. Perhaps there's a longer session here trying to get out... Anyone else, feel free to comment!

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Some links and resources

• http://www.productmanager.co.uk/ProductManagement.htm
• http://marketing.about.com/cs/marketingjobs/l/blproductmanagr.htm
• http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0658001353/102-8743432-2928925?v=glance&n=283155
• http://featuredreports.monster.com/productmanager/primer/

Interesting - all of these point to Product Managing as being a *much* bigger role than that of (say) the customer in XP, and bigger than I envisage a PM to be in a small-to-medium size software company.

• http://www.goodexperience.com/blog/archives/000066.php

A product management story from the front line

• http://heynorton.typepad.com/blog/2005/06/how_to_hire_pro.html

More advice from someone who's been there