Agile Product Management Overview

1. Agile Product Management
Overview
By Alex Apollonsky

2. Agenda
● Who is Product Owner?
● Product Owner Responsibilities
● Product Communication
● Product Strategy
● Product Delivery

3. Who is Product Owner?

4. Product owner Responsibilities
● Product Communication
○ Communicate with Clients and SMEs, understand customer needs, constraints,
milestones
○ Manage stakeholders to ensure product-related information flow across the company
○ Guide development team to ensure product delivery
● Product Planning
○ Formalize product needs and goals
○ Develop product strategy/roadmap
○ Define user experience and product features
● Product Delivery
○ Create Prioritized Product Backlog based on Product Strategy
○ Manage mockups and UI designs
○ Set the Sprint goal, document User Stories and Acceptance Criteria
○ Lead planning sessions with development team
○ Maintain backlog to reflect changes and to provide better descriptions
○ Accept implemented Sprint stories (or don’t!)
○ Make coffee for development team if helps with getting things done!

5. What PO Should NOT Do?
● Manage Developers
○ PO guides developer’s priorities but not manages them directly
● Take on Scrum Master’s responsibilities
○ PO’s goals (get as many things done as possible) contradict Scrum Master’s goals (enforce
the dev process)

6. Product Planning Template
● Problem Statement
● Product Goals
● User Scenarios
● User Roles
● Product Epics
○ functionality
● Mockups
● Product Stories
○ specific requirements
● Milestones
● Releases Breakdown
Product Epics + Milestones + Releases Breakdown = Product Roadmap

7. Sample Product Roadmap
http://www.productplan.com/product-roadmap-templates/

8. Product Delivery
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(software_development)

9. User Stories
● As a <user role>, I want <goal> so that <reason>
Title: Select Holiday Season
Description: As a vice president of marketing, I want to select a holiday season to be used when
reviewing the performance of past advertising campaigns so that I can identify profitable ones.
Acceptance Criteria: Detail could be added to that user story example by adding the following conditions
of satisfaction:
● Make sure it works with major retail holidays: Christmas, Easter, President’s Day, Mother’s Day,
Father’s Day, Labor Day, New Year’s Day.
● Support holidays that span two calendar years (none span three).
● Holiday seasons can be set from one holiday to the next (such as Thanksgiving to Christmas).
● Holiday seasons can be set to be a number of days prior to the holiday.
Parts from https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/agile/user-stories

10. Next: hands on
● Create Sample Product Plan
● Write Stories
● Prioritize
● Plan Sprint