#AtlassianSummit — A Products Manager place in a DevOps World
This is an extract blog post from the talk that Dave Meyer, Senior Product Manager at Atlassian presented at Atlassian Summit Europe 2017. His presentation was around the role that Product Manager need to do on a DevOps team.
A key trend we are seeing in the Atlasssian ecosystem and also at the Global Scrum Gathering in San Diego has been around DevOps. Which is becoming a key component inside the Enterprise to become more agile in delivering and supporting products or services.
One of the most important roles for a company focused on delivering world class products is the Product Manager; the person that coordinates tasks plus resources on a development and also the operations team. There some silos in the industry, which puts the Product Development and Operations team in specific responsibilities roles that are not building the right collaborative environment. This is a great post regarding Dev Ops Topologies that you should read.
Now that Cloud solutions provide a much quicker way to deliver On-Demands services for the Enterprise the role of the Product Manager changes. It needs to be aware that there is a reliability issue inherited with cloud solutions that the PM needs to be clear in the activities that are expected from her.
Dave Meyer spoke about a PM’s need in understanding 2 important aspects of their role during an incident — Support Time & Mean Time To Repair (MTTR).
Support response time is the key to happy customers — Dave Meyer.
A team’s reaction to incidents is critical for customers to be engaged with your organization; you are providing a service to customers all over the world and they want to feel covered by their provider. The Product Manager should be on top of what the development and the operations teams are doing in order to solve incidents and to make sure that a procedure to avoid such incidents is being documented to create internal knowledge for both teams.
The ideal scenario is that Operations is completely embedded inside the product development team, this way the whole team takes accountability of incidents and gets the advantage of pre-established communication channels that will help solve issues quickly.
Response time & Product Development.
One key metric that came out of the talk was Appdex (Application Performance Index) which is an Open Standard to measure, report and compare performance of software services. The goal is to provide insights about user satisfaction. One of these measures is response time based on a threshold.
What Dave suggest is that your team can focus on AppDex to identify important issues that can be added to future development sprints, resulting in improving the delivery of better experience to clients.
We found out that overall our client satisfaction increased if we focused on the issues that came up during the Appdex analysis of our platform — Dave Meyer.
They also use a measure called R.U.F which stands for Realiability, Usability and Functionality to measure the overall performance of JIRA in delivering its service.
Overall the Product Manager needs to be involved in these three stages in a DevOps environment:
- Pre-release, that means staying sharp and have operational readiness.
- Release, when the service is being rolled out. They have to support the team.
- Post-release, be aware of incidents and have a process ready create insights.
The enterprise is looking to DevOps to solve their scaling issues and PM’s are playing a very important part in this. Dave talked some more about it, but we will have to wait for the videos from Atlasssian Summit to be online.
If you are using Atlassian tools and you care for #Agile and continuous improvement, or if you are ina remote team, then stop by SoftwareDevTools.com and have a look at our Retros & Estimations tools.
If you’re up to trying new technologies, then you HAVE to try our stand.BOT. A cool new Slack bot connected to JIRA.
In the mean time Happy Planning!
