Agile Product Management | Journal Articles - Product Focus

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What is Agile product management?

How does it link to Agile product development? And what are the product management roles and responsibilities in Agile?

Agile – the basics
Scrum – what it is and how it works
Product Manager vs Product Owner
Scaling Agile
A guide to Zen Agile
Discovery – tools to build market insight and customer empathy
The Product Management/Agile fit

You may be working in a software company that has always used Agile product development approaches like Scrum. You might be encountering Agile for the first time and wondering what value it can bring to your business. Maybe you’ve been asked to take on the Product Owner role.

This page will give you a basic understanding of Agile product management and, importantly, what it means to you as someone managing products.

Agile product development is now the dominant approach when developing software products. While there has been widespread adoption and undoubted benefits, the traditional Waterfall approach is still used in many organizations. We want to sift the hype from reality and help you talk sensibly about Agile.

All the articles below are in our Agile Product Management Journal – why not sign-up here.

Agile – the basics

Agile was born in the world of software development, where you can build the first version and keep adding to it or changing it to make improvements. You get to see results more quickly and because you can check and change what you do in each iteration, it lowers the risk of getting it wrong.

It is an approach that accepts uncertainty and promotes experimentation and close collaboration with customers.

The Agile approach is often contrasted with Waterfall methodologies where development flows through a series of phases that can take months, if not years to deliver.

Read more in our journal article Everything you need to know about Agile.

Scrum – what it is and how it works

Scrum is a project management framework for Agile product development.

As the most popular and widely-used Agile product development approach, it has become synonymous with Agile software development.

It does not dictate how everything should be done on a project but leaves many details to the development team. However, it does have a set of defined roles, rituals, terminology, and tools.

Read more in our journal article all about Scrum.

Product Manager vs Product Owner

One of the key aspects of Agile is that the development team must work closely with someone who understands what the customers want for the product. The role is critical to driving what is developed. In Scrum, this role is called the Product Owner and involves prioritizing the backlog of requirements, answering day-to-day questions, providing signoffs and feedback. Done properly it takes a large commitment of effort and time.

Agile roles framework

Adapted from Agile roles framework created by Paul Inness, using the Golden Circle by Simon Sinek

As a Product Manager, you may do the Product Owner role, you may work with a Product Owner or you may be a Product Owner who also does product management activities.

Understanding the product manager’s roles and responsibilities in agile is key.

One way to separate the different roles is to look at their focus on requirements, Why, What, and How.

The Product Manager will be concerned to a large degree with Why a requirement is important based for example, on its fit with strategy, value to customers, value to the business, and competitive positioning. The Product Owner will work on the details of What is required and will to a lesser degree worry about why each requirement is important and how it will be built. The development team needs business and market context, but most of their focus will be on How to build the requirement and then getting on with it.

The reality is that some businesses only have the Product Owner or the Product Manager role. But if both roles exist, they must be aligned on who does what and the priorities for the product to get agile product management right.

Read more in our journal article survive and prosper with Agile. This article has 5 key areas to help you understand what to focus on in agile product management.

Scaling Agile

Small software companies are often built from the ground up using Agile development approaches. Also, being small, start-ups usually have the agility to quickly adapt their way of working while still keeping everyone aligned – the whole organization is Agile in the broadest sense of the word. This works well in a small team of close-knit people, sharing a common goal of delivering great products that their customers really value.

But, how does that same organization keep being Agile when it grows to a large number of people, with mature processes, complex products, perhaps operating in multinational markets?

Also, what about the more common scenario of existing, mature organizations looking to evolve and become more Agile – what do they typically do, and more to the point, what should they do?

Source: Scaling Methods and approaches. VersionOne 14th Annual State of Agile Report 2020

Read more in our journal article that explains the different approaches to scaling agile.

A guide to Zen Agile

Agile is one of the most discussed topics in tech and a potential battleground between Development and Management.

Read this entertaining blog by Aidan Dunphy on how to handle Agile … A guide to Zen Agile.

Discovery – tools to build market insight and customer empathy

The term ‘discovery’ covers a range of techniques that help product and marketing people get the insights they need to improve their products.
While the word has been around for millennia, in the context of products, it was probably first coined by Marty Cagan in his book, Inspired. His choice was made, as he says, “… to illustrate the need for an open mind to know what they [Product Managers and teams] can’t know and admit what they don’t know.”

Read more in our journal article on Discovery.

The Product Management/Agile fit

Agile methodologies like Scrum are used widely to develop software products. They describe key roles and responsibilities for the product development team with the aim of delivering products that are valued by customers.

What is not included by most Agile methodologies are the other activities needed to ensure products are successful, for example, optimizing in-life, pricing, and marketing.

Without these activities, a great product, while it might be valued by customers, won’t maximize its commercial return for a business and may fail altogether. So, what’s needed by businesses are the activities covered by Agile development methodologies as well as other product management activities. Together they make up the entirety of agile product management.

Read more in our journal article that explains the agile/product management fit.