On top of that, they were unwilling to install, test and validate new releases often (as that was perceived as expensive), so we didn’t have such a big incentive to move to Agile! While you may be surprised that we were still using a Waterfall process not that long ago, keep in mind that, because of security concerns, many IT organizations in the enterprise world only started to accept storing their data outside the confines of their firewall 3-4 years ago. When I joined back in 2011 we started the transition from Waterfall to Agile by borrowing some concepts from SCRUM, like the sprints and the Product Owner role.
Agile product manager software#
I have spent the last five years doing product management for an enterprise software application.
Agile product manager how to#
While the goals remain the same, the way to achieve those goals has evolved significantly and organizations have been working hard to figure out how to organize the Product Management function to ensure the success of the products they build.
The introduction of these new project management principles has had a very important impact in the role of Product Management.
This allowed for a much more efficient way to build software that would quickly adapt to market needs.Īgile and lean project management principles spread quickly across organizations delivering software directly over the Internet. This new delivery channel changed completely the landscape: updates to the product could be delivered rapidly, and user feedback captured immediately. In the late 90s, the growth of the Internet unlocked a new way to deliver software: Application Service Providers (ASP), which ultimately evolved to Software as a Service (SaaS) a few years later. Then, during the implementation phase the Product Manager has time to work out the details of the go-to-market strategy: marketing message, pricing, distribution channels, etc. They document those requirements in a long, detailed product specification document that is handed over to the development team for implementation. In Waterfall, the Product Managers initially spends most of their time doing market research and talking to the different stakeholders to capture the requirements. Multi-year release cycles weren’t uncommon. Hence a lot of emphasis was put on spec-ing out every detail of the product, planning development and ensuring the quality of the product before release. The process made sense in a world where getting users to test and validate your product and delivering updates where both hard and expensive activities.
This same Waterfall model was later adopted for software product development as a familiar working model.
Everything has (or at least had) to be planned and spec-ed out in detail in an attempt to prevent mistakes and costly changes later in the process. At the time, the process for creating products was similar to the Waterfall project management model we’re familiar with because the development, testing, production and market distribution of physical goods is expensive and slow. A few weeks back, Martin Eriksson reviewed the history of Product Management and explained how the discipline was born in the FMCG manufacturing industry.
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