Agile Goes Mainstream

On today’s → Forrester Blog for Technical Product Management & Marketing Professionals, you find a → report from a conference on Agile.

Interview

You find there as well information (an interview) from/with → Pragmatic Marketing, a company that specializes in training for Product Management in technology companies. The latter interview gives you information about the business case for Product Management, and it answers questions about the why, the benefit, or the type of questions, which affect today’s Product Managers. It also informs you about the training offers in the area of agile, or it analyzes the changes that take place for PM, while companies move to agile development methods.

Agile Conference

Summarizing the agile conference, it seems to be that agile currently goes mainstream. On this years‘ conference a large number of participants came from different roles in the companies – showing the increasing importance, and breadth of this topic. They say, a high percentage (above 40%) of the participants were doing something with agile. This is showing that it would be a good moment, and a helpful career move for PMs to start looking into the agile topic.

A said before, on the blog you find a vocal presentation in MP3 format. Following this presentation, half of the participants was working with strategic intentions, showing their big interest in methods to get the agile topic running. There were also a lot of well prepared questions.

Role Model

Steve (Pragmatic Marketing) is, among others,  talking in the interview about the role of Product Management in agile projects. He also reiterates the different tasks of these Product Managers in the different agile companies. In my understanding – what he says, shows that currently there is a certain unsecurity in many companies of how to apply agile methods. And it shows that the role of PM in Agile ecosystems is not really set at current.

Asked about the role of PM in 5 years, he said that he observes that PM tasks are bleeding into other departments (the product owner role goes to development, and the customer facing role goes back to sales). I personally do not think that this movement will really be taking place.

Just to give you an example: When looking for new innovative projects and products, it is helpful to talk to customers (ok), but it is dangerous to pay 100% attention to the exact requirements (as a sales person would do). To develop innovative products, you need more than this, and you need to understand the hidden needs (these are the requirements, not mentioned). Further, you must know a lot about the technologies at hand, to address these needs.

And this role can only be filled by someone, who has a different focus than sales, and the next deal (I think).

Weiterführende Informationen

Das Original dieses Artikels ist auf →Der Produktmanager erschienen (©Andreas Rudolph). Regelmäßige Artikel gibt es über die (→Mailingliste), oder indem Sie →mir auf Twitter folgen. In der Online Version finden Sie hier die versprochenen weiterführenden Links:

This entry was posted on Mittwoch, September 2nd, 2009 at 9:18 pm. It is filed under Agile&Scrum, Thema des Tages and tagged with Agile Development, Beispiele, English Content, Rolle des PM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.