Managing in an agile world

Products and features are meant to be fluid. Fluidity creates customizability, product and development life cycles, and ultimately creates products that are better in tune with what users need. In essence, product management is about creating good work that is on budget and on time — but even more importantly, products that people use. Product management is central in product and research strategy, development, testing and launch as it is the crux to taking care of a backlog of tasks and meeting important deadlines. Many times, product managers are thought of as “schedulers” or “organizers”, but product managers guide and collaborate with internal and external parties to build customer value, measurable business benefits, and the associated timelines to make goals reality. Rolls can include the planning and understanding of: internal current teams, external supply chain and market, upstream planning, development, and launch, and finally the downstream, ongoing product lifecycle.

Above all, product managers are responsible for maximizing business function and product features through extensive understanding of their consumers. It starts with setting a vision for the product, which requires you to do lots of research — research your market, your customer and the problem they have that you’re trying to solve. Product managers must be able to take in and organize huge amounts of information — quantitative and qualitative data from your web analytics, research reports and interviews, market trends and statistics — project managers must understand the market and the customer.

Agile project management is very different from more traditional methods. The agile methodology embraces the idea that the only constant in the creation of products is change and iteration. The agile methodology focuses on keeping the development, marketing, and design teams on the same page by assessing functional value as it aligns with the customer feedback and business goals. Instead of using a primary approach with big upfront market research and business analysis, agile product management gathers user feedback on early feature builds and prototypes and then works to adapt the product and design accordingly. Therefore as product managers learn to forecast upstream for development and launch, the team already knows how people are going to react once the product is released. This not only saves time and money, but ensures that the products that are built serve the consumer.

The authors of the Agile Manifesto also agreed upon the following 12 principles for agile development:

1. Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
2. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.
3. Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
4. Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
5. Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
6. The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within the development team is face-to-face conversation.
7. Working software is the primary measure of progress.
8. Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
10. Simplicity — the art of maximizing the amount of work not done — is essential.
11. The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
12. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

Agile development is aimed at continuous attention to the daily change to your product that will create lasting value for your customer. The project manager’s role is to keep everyone on target and away from any ideas based solely on assumptions, help organize, facilitate, and guide discussions, make product and research decisions, and organize schedules around work. As we begin the 15 week process of developing a product, we must keep in mind who we are designing it for, what we are designing, and why we are designing it. Lets go make awesome!