More Related Content Similar to Agile09: The Product Manager/Owner Dilemma Similar to Agile09: The Product Manager/Owner Dilemma (20) More from Rich Mironov (18) 1. The Agile Product Manager /
Product Owner Dilemma
Rich Mironov, CMO, Enthiosys
rmironov@enthiosys.com
© 2009, Enthiosys Inc. All rights reserved. www.enthiosys.com or 650.528.4000
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2. An Unapologetic Product Guy
• CMO at Enthiosys, agile product mgmt consultancy
– Business models/pricing, roadmaps
– Innovation Games® and customer needs
– Agile transformation, interim PM executive
• Repeat offender at software prod mgmt
– Product Owner, 25 years as Product Mgr
• “The Art of Product Management”
• Agile 2009 PM/PO track
• Founded P-Camp
© 2009, Enthiosys Inc. All rights reserved. www.enthiosys.com or 650.528.4000
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3. Agenda
• Context, scope, terminology
– Development-only or inbound/outbound cross-functional?
– Product strategy vs. vision vs. backlog
– “Business value” vs. quarterly revenue goal
• Why talk about product managers
and product owners?
• What does a product manager do?
– Or… what do I mean when I say “product manager”?
• How does this map to product owners?
• Recommendations
© 2009, Enthiosys Inc. All rights reserved. www.enthiosys.com or 650.528.4000
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4. My Biases
• Focus on commercial software
– Revenue-driven software companies and software-
dependent products
– Long-term success is measured in revenue, market share
• Agile development is a (huge) part of business agility
• Most product failures are market failures, not
development failures
• Product line strategies should exist before dev
teams start serious work
• Good product managers have first-hand experience
marketing/selling/installing software
© 2009, Enthiosys Inc. All rights reserved. www.enthiosys.com or 650.528.4000
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5. Disjoint Communities
Product
Agile Community
Managers
Nearly empty, very lonely
© 2009, Enthiosys Inc. All rights reserved. www.enthiosys.com or 650.528.4000
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6. Product Owner? Product Manager?
• Most Agilists think narrowly about product owners
– Core member of agile team
– Physically present most of the time
– Driving user stories and sub-iteration decisions
– Showcase provides primary customer input
• Most product managers are not yet Agilists
– Majority of work to deliver products (revenue) happens
outside Engineering
– Markets must be experienced directly, not filtered through
Sales or Marketing or surveys
– Servicing multiple inbound and outbound queues
© 2009, Enthiosys Inc. All rights reserved. www.enthiosys.com or 650.528.4000
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7. What Does Product Management Do?
budgets, staff, strategy, forecasts,
commitments, roadmaps,
targets Executives competitive intelligence
market information, priorities,
requirements, roadmaps, MRDs, Field input,
personas, user stories… Market feedback
Product
Management
Mktg & Markets &
Development
Sales Customers
software
Segmentation, messages,
benefits/features, pricing,
qualification, demos…
© 2009, Enthiosys Inc. All rights reserved. www.enthiosys.com or 650.528.4000
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8. Product Management Planning Horizons
many years
Strategy
years
Exec Portfolio
many mons
Product
PM Release 2-9 mon
Sprint 2 wk
Dev
Team Daily
© 2009, Enthiosys Inc. All rights reserved. www.enthiosys.com or 650.528.4000
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9. “Above The Release”
Customers Competitors
VP x CxO CxO CxO VP y
Strategy
Portfolio
Product
Release
Sprint
Daily
© 2009, Enthiosys Inc. All rights reserved. www.enthiosys.com or 650.528.4000
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10. Pragmatic Marketing® Framework
Less Technical
Business Marketing
Positioning
Plan Plan
Market Market Buying Customer
Pricing
Problems Definition Process Acquisition
Win/Loss Distribution Buy, Build Buyer Customer
Analysis Strategy or Partner Personas Retention
Strategic
Distinctive Product Product User Program
Tactical
Competence Portfolio Profitability Personas Effectiveness
Market Strategy Business Planning Programs Readiness Support
Competitive Product Require- Launch Sales Presentations
Innovation
Landscape Roadmap ments Plan Process & Demos
Technology Use Thought “Special”
Collateral
Assessment Scenarios Leadership Calls
Status Lead Sales Event
Dashboard Generation Tools Support
Referrals & Channel Channel
References Training Support
More Technical
© 1993-2009 Pragmatic Marketing, Inc. All rights reserved
© 2009, Enthiosys Inc. All rights reserved. www.enthiosys.com or 650.528.4000
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11. Pragmatic Marketing® Framework
Dir, Prod Strategy Prod Mktg Mgr
Business Marketing
Positioning
Plan Plan
Market Market Buying Customer
Pricing
Problems Definition Process Acquisition
Win/Loss Distribution Buy, Build Buyer Customer
Analysis Strategy or Partner Personas Retention
Distinctive Product Product User Program
Competence Portfolio Profitability Personas Effectiveness
Market Strategy Business Planning Programs Readiness Support
Competitive Product Require- Launch Sales Presentations
Innovation
Landscape Roadmap ments Plan Process & Demos
Technology Use Thought “Special”
Collateral
Assessment Scenarios Leadership Calls
Status Lead Sales Event
Dashboard Generation Tools Support
Tech Prod Mgr
Referrals & Channel Channel
References Training Support
© 1993-2009 Pragmatic Marketing, Inc. All rights reserved
© 2009, Enthiosys Inc. All rights reserved. www.enthiosys.com or 650.528.4000
11
13. What Does a Product Owner Do?
• “In Scrum, a single person must have final authority representing
the customer's interest in backlog prioritization and requirements
questions. This person must be available to the team at any
time, especially during the sprint planning meeting and the
sprint review meeting.”
• Responsible for
– Defining the features of the product
– Deciding release date and content
– Profitability of the product (ROI?)
– Prioritizing features according to market value
– Changing features and priority between iterations
– Accepting or rejecting work results
• How developers have defined product management
© 2009, Enthiosys Inc. All rights reserved. www.enthiosys.com or 650.528.4000
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14. Ideal Product Owner Must Be…
• Omniscient, telepathic
• Represent true market needs without spending a
lot of time “in the field”
• Manage complexities of detailed stories as well
as marketplace financial tradeoffs
• Very difficult to do “solo”
– Nearly impossible without some product
management experience
© 2009, Enthiosys Inc. All rights reserved. www.enthiosys.com or 650.528.4000
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15. Product Owner’s Calendar
Borrowed from Catherine Connor, Rally
© 2009, Enthiosys Inc. All rights reserved. www.enthiosys.com or 650.528.4000
15
16. Two Sizes of Product Owner
• “small p” product owner
– Focus on iterations (up through releases)
– User story elaboration, backlog management
– Available to dev team hour by hour
– Customer showcase (rather than primary market research)
– Internal recruit, often limited product management experience
• “Big P” Product Owner, aka Chief Product Owner
– Strategic view of customers, profitability, markets
– Sets broad direction, owns resource allocation
– Deep experience with customer segments
• In my experience, “Big P” Product Owners call themselves:
– VP/GM of Business Unit
– VP Product Management
– VP Engineering
© 2009, Enthiosys Inc. All rights reserved. www.enthiosys.com or 650.528.4000
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17. PO/PM Organizational Map
GM - VP PM - VP Eng/CTO
Product
Management
Organization
product owners
more market-focused more technical
© 2009, Enthiosys Inc. All rights reserved. www.enthiosys.com or 650.528.4000
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18. “small p” product owner
Executives
customer information, priorities,
requirements, roadmaps,
personas, user stories…
product
owner
Marketing/Sales
Development
Customers
software
© 2009, Enthiosys Inc. All rights reserved. www.enthiosys.com or 650.528.4000
18
19. Adapted Pragmatic Marketing® Framework
Business Marketing
Positioning
Plan Plan
Market Market Buying Customer
Pricing
Problems Definition Process Acquisition
Win/Loss Distribution Buy, Build Buyer Customer
Analysis Strategy or Partner Personas Retention
Distinctive Product Product User Program
Competence Portfolio Profitability Personas Effectiveness
Market Strategy Business Planning Programs Readiness Support
lo g,
Competitive Product
Innovation ack w
Require
bments ork
Launch Sales Presentations
Landscape Roadmap ep t Plan Process & Demos
acc
,
Technology Use s
rie Thought “Special”
sto R Collateral
Assessment NF
Scenarios Leadership Calls
Statusn/up Lead Sales Event
dow
Dashboard Generation Tools Support
product owner b urn
Processives
t Referrals & Channel Channel
pe c
tros
improvement
re
References Training Support
Teamm a
l- t e
alneedss k
tas
© 2009, Enthiosys Inc. All rights reserved. www.enthiosys.com or 650.528.4000
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20. Much More to Do
• IMO, Product Owner role adds 40-60% more
work for a traditional product manager
• PM is like to be overcommitted already
– Too many constituents, queues, roles
– Heavily time-sliced
– PM capacity planning is a challenge
• Natural for PMs to ignore how stretched they are
• Agile highlights/worsens existing problem
© 2009, Enthiosys Inc. All rights reserved. www.enthiosys.com or 650.528.4000
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21. Product Manager Failure Modes
Solo Product Manager fails the agile team if…
• Part-timer, not fully engaged in team
• Lack of detail on stories, acceptance tests
• Stale items in backlog
• Handwaving and bluster
• Best of intentions, but pulled in
too many directions
• “Build what I meant”
© 2009, Enthiosys Inc. All rights reserved. www.enthiosys.com or 650.528.4000
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22. Product Owner Failure Modes
Solo Product Owner fails the market if…
• Weak on actual economic value: pricing,
packaging, upgrade barriers, professional
services, discounting, competitive dynamics
• Disconnected from cross-functional teams that
turn software into products (Marketing, Sales, Support…)
• Trading off company-wide product strategy in favor
of product-level features
• Substituting showcases for broad market input
© 2009, Enthiosys Inc. All rights reserved. www.enthiosys.com or 650.528.4000
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23. Scalable PM/PO Models
People and organizations matter. Consider:
1. Small product, co-located team
– Agile product manager is the product owner
1. Complex product
– PM covers strategic/outbound, PO (TPM) for inbound
– Report up through same PM management chain
1. Distributed teams
– One or more PMs at main Eng location, heavy travel schedule
– Every remote team has a PO (or PM)
– Frequent, intense collaboration among all PMs/POs
1. Pool of PM/PO talent with strategic leadership
– Larger departments, enough resources to allocate
– Pair up, mix and match, share, segment, be creative
© 2009, Enthiosys Inc. All rights reserved. www.enthiosys.com or 650.528.4000
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24. Recapping My Biases
• Titles don’t matter, but activities and roles do
• A seasoned Agile Product Manager can also be a
Product Owner
– Cover both roles for one moderately complex product
– Heroically for two products?
• A Seasoned Product Owner can rarely also be a
Product Manager
– Outbound coordination and Sales/Marketing/Field role
don’t fit into schedule or expertise
• Product Management and Engineering have a
historically complicated relationship
© 2009, Enthiosys Inc. All rights reserved. www.enthiosys.com or 650.528.4000
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25. Take-Aways
• PM/PO: One of the reasons Agile delivers better
software
• Activities and roles matter more than titles…
• Product Manager POV: Agile makes PM job bigger
– Market demands and first-hand interactions don’t go away
– Challenging for one PM to cover both roles
• Product Owner POV: customers are the market
– Need deep and complex market inputs to represent
users/customers/markets
– Must partner with PMs or grow into full PM role
• Emerging staffing and training problem
• Think about skills mix, R&D geo-distribution
© 2009, Enthiosys Inc. All rights reserved. www.enthiosys.com or 650.528.4000
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26. The Agile Product Manager /
Product Owner Dilemma
Rich Mironov, CMO, Enthiosys
rmironov@enthiosys.com
© 2009, Enthiosys Inc. All rights reserved. www.enthiosys.com or 650.528.4000
26
Editor's Notes Page Contents © Enthiosys, 2009. Specifically talking about software, but in the broader context. We see all kinds of companies shipping products/services for revenue that include software, bundle software, depend on SaaS, etc. Let’s assume for now that almost all products are software, depend on software, or build in software. So place to start is the basics of what a product manager does, then compare it to a product owner. We’re about two years behind. Dev doesn’t understand PM, and went ahead without us. In some ways, takes us back 25 years to the evolution of software product management Emphasize three audiences, three languages, three challenges. Rest of talk is broken up into three sections, one each for customers, executives and development. Pragmatic has done a great job of identifying what needs to happen. If you expect to make money on a product or service, these must get done by someone. Lots of ways to carve this if resources allow more than one person, after we acknowledge the necessity. (if this is new to you, lots of material on the prag site.) For instance, “triad” configuration often recommended by Steve Johnson. Note that entire grid is covered. Or split left (PM) and right (PMM). We know that we have impossible jobs. See http://www.scrumalliance.org/articles/39-glossary-of-scrum-terms#1122 From CSM class materials. See http://www.controlchaos.com/certification/cspo.php CSPO: certified scrum product owner. 1-2 days classes, e.g. from Mike Cohn www.enthiosys.com What does a typical 2-week iteration look like? • A living backlog of prioritized work to be done • A brief planning session in which the backlog items for the sprint will be defined: Team commits to work to be completed, identify tasks (and hours associated), collectively commits to getting it done during course of iteration • A brief daily meeting or scrum , at which progress is explained, upcoming work is described and impediments are raised: • 1.What have you done since the last scrum meeting? 2.What has impeded your work? 3.What do you plan on doing between now and the next scrum meeting? Review with Product Owner to review and accept/reject work Insert example of agenda . . . Insert example of retrospectives Iterations should not be longer than 4 weeks . . . . Often PO is program manager, requirements analyst, user representative, business analysts… recruited into position without training or any PM experience Certainly, there are executives who would agree that they act as big product owners – but when you check their business cards you see titles like “Senior Product Manager” and “VP Product Management” and “COO, Network Security Products.” They don’t self-identify as product owners. Plus team-related activities that were not part of traditional PM role: Process improvement and retrospectives Pitching in on broad team tasks including estimation, acceptance testing Page Contents © Enthiosys, 2009.
