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What is agile product management? When should you use it?
I've seen big trends recently around agile product management. I assume this is designed to go along with agile software development. Is this just a fad? When should you use it? What are the pros and cons?
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6 Answers
While it could be a fad, this one seems to be sticking around. Agile focuses on quick, frequent releases, a unified team (Product Management, Developer, UI Expert, QA) dedicated to the project/product, and attempts to minimize writing specifications by focusing on user stories. The idea, in general, is to do quicker releases to enable more flexibility in releases, and avoids the 6 month development cycle which can often end with disappointment as the features don't deliver what users want.
Where I've seen Agile most successful (and really where it comes from) is in single-product companies. The prototypical Agile user would be a website like, say, Etsy.com or Tumblr.com - just about everyone in the company is likely focused on improving the website.
Where Agile has more trouble is when you have multiple products/projects with interdependencies. So, I've got a user-facing website that is developing along one path, I've got another website that I'm also developing on a separate path. However, when I roll out a new feature, it has to be represented on both websites - which may or may not be the top priority for each team.
Most of the time, I've seen these issued dealt with by having a longer-term release at the same time you're doing shorter term releases. So, dependent features get pushed to the longer-term release, with all projects releasing at the same time. Non-dependent features can be rolled out at any time.
Where Agile really doesn't work, in my opinion, is in matrixed environments where people are not dedicated to one project. You need dedicated resources, and business leaders may not be comfortable with the idea that resources might be allocated to projects all the time. I've seen it happen where someone comes in and says "well, if we want to make the deadline, we need to add engineers" - but that's a no-no in Agile as far as I'm concerned - what you should say "what features aren't going to make it?"
I will say that business owners much prefer Agile to standard waterfall development - you just get much more transparency in my opinion. All just my opinion - comments/critiques welcome.
dskills. Great background. Thank you.
I think Agile is fantastic. My organization is in a similar situation: many competing priorities, but a single development team. Having a backlog and frequent releases keeps "emergencies" from derailing focused work.
I have recently had to sell Agile development to a number of stakeholders (the rest of our management team, board members, other developers) and I've found that simple is best: "Agile is delivering the most (business) value, as early as possible, and as often as possible!" (from this StackOverflow thread http://stackoverflow.com/questions/909291/how-to-explain-agile-to-a-non-devel...)
You can see a lot more of my thoughts on Agile development, as well as how we use the particular constraints of BaseCamp to manage it, here:
http://mindtangle.net/2009/12/04/how-to-use-basecamp-for-agile-development/
Hi Eric,
Agile project management should be used in a project where requirements from the client are not static and keep on changing frequently. This happens in most projects, however I am talking about a scenario in which major changes are happening in the prototyping stage. In such a scenario, agile management is the best method as iterations can be used to develop small phases/modules of a project which can be modified according to the client later on.
This used to be called concurrent engineering. Running various aspects of the product development effort in parallel. Today it is very much the same only with today's design tools and requirements for DFM and robust design and non stop demand for shortening the design cycle (time to market) agile project management is a constant. It is part of the design to price world and especially commodities.We could all name many computing firms that require these design processes and culture/tools to earn a seat at the approved vendor list table. Agile project management means meeting customer time to market, price, DFM and ribost design specs. And they change all the time. It's not the big that eat the small but the fast that beat the slow. Jim Schultz, SMG.
For a summary of Agile Product Management, you might want to read "Living in an Agile World". Dean Leffingwell (one of the Agile Manifesto authors) described it as "...the best job to date of describing the yin and yang of APO (Agile Product Owner) and APM (Agile Product Manager)." http://www.pragmaticmarketing.com/pdf/Living_in_an_Agile_World.pdf
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