Presented to Silicon Valley Product Camp '15: Product managers and product owners can engage and motivate their teams to delight customers - or they can distract and dishearten their teams. Ron Lichty has been a product manager and VP leading both development organizations and product teams. As a development leader, he regards product managers who "get it" as key partners. Here are 16 ways to engage and motivate product teams - and together delight customers!

1. Product Owners: How to Get Your
Development Team to Love You!!
!
!Ron Lichty, principal, Ron Lichty Consulting
author, Managing the Unmanageable!
!
www.RonLichty.com www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net !

2. * Addison Wesley published October 2012
*

3. Ron Lichty,
Managing Development Product Teams
SOFTWEST

4. Teams: Scrum and Agile
1-4 weeks!

5. * Addison Wesley published October 2012
*
Managers, Product Managers Execs

6. Rules of Thumb / Nuggets of Wisdom*
* 300 in the book

7. Rules of Thumb / Nuggets of Wisdom*
• Brooks’s Law: Adding manpower to a late
software project makes it later.
– Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
* 300 in the book

8. Delight Your Customers
In the beginning, everyone will talk about scope,
and budget, and schedule, but in the end,
nobody really cares about any of those things.
The only thing they care about is this:
People will love your software, or they won’t.
So that’s the only criterion to which you
should truly manage.
—Joseph Kleinschmidt, CTO

9. Delight Your Customers
• Making a difference…

10. How to Get
Your Agile Team
to Love You!

11. Partner

12. 12
Partner
ScrumTeam.jpg (from Exploring Scrum- the Fundamentals, by Dan Rawsthorne Doug Shimp)

13. Prioritize

14. Prioritize
14

15. Share the “What” not the “How”

16. Share the Big Picture

17. Block the Noise

18. Block the Noise
--John Evans photo
Be a damper to the noise. --Joe Kleinschmidt, CTO

19. Annual Study
of Product Team Performance

20. Support Agile Values
Methodology
You
Use
Methodology
You
Associate
with
Increase
Profits
Agile
Blended
(Some
Waterfall
and
Some
Agile)
Lean
Waterfall
Agile
73.9%
13.0%
9.8%
0.0%
Blended
(Some
Waterfall
and
Some
Agile)
31.8%
46.2%
10.6%
6.1%
Lean
14.3%
0.0%
42.9%
14.3%
Waterfall
15.8%
50.0%
18.4%
13.2%
Don't
Know
5.3%
42.1%
26.3%
5.3%

21. Make Trade-Offs

22. Be Available

23. Let Developers Focus

24. Let Developers Focus
• Multitasking?

25. 25
Let the Team Focus
ScrumTeam.jpg (from Exploring Scrum- the Fundamentals, by Dan Rawsthorne Doug Shimp)

26. Have the Data

27. Have the Data
• “If you don’t have time to calculate value,
we don’t have time to calculate cost.”
--Jim Highsmith, agile coach and guru

28. Have the Data
• You need to know about this classic book:
Software by Numbers
Mark Denne Jane Cleland-Huang

29. Have the Data
• You need to know about this classic book:
Software by Numbers
Mark Denne Jane Cleland-Huang
– the source of
• Minimum Marketable Features (MMFs)
• Incremental Funding Methodology (IFM)

30. Engage Users

31. Engage Users
• Remember: It’s about delighting users!

32. Listen

33. Incorporate Engineering’s Stories

34. Incorporate Engineering’s Stories
• Webinar w Greg Cohen:
http://www.slideshare.net/RonLichty/
prioritizing-the-product-backlog-aipmm-webinar

35. Be Tech Savvy

36. Theme Your Sprints

37. It’s the Values
• Create an Agile Culture

38. It’s the Values
• Support Agile Values
The Agile Manifesto
– We value:
• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan
-- http://agilemanifesto.org/

39. It’s the Values
• Support Agile Values
Value the Agile Manifesto over sets of practices
– We value:
• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan
-- http://agilemanifesto.org/

40. Ron Lichty Consulting
• Interim acting CTO/VP Eng roles / making development hum
– http://ronlichty.com, Ron@RonLichty.com
• The book:
Managing the Unmanageable:
Rules, Tools Insights for Managing Software People Teams
– http://ManagingTheUnmanageable.net
• The study:
The Study of Product Team Performance
– http://www.ronlichty.com/study.html
• Training:
Agile for Teams
The Agile Manager
Managing Software People and Teams