Skip to main content

XPM Followup

In following up on the original article and my comments on XPM, Barbara Nelson writes:
Extreme Product Management is meant to articulate the role of product management in embracing Extreme Programming. XPM is not about managing the sprints and iterations; when building products (not one-time projects), product managers need to operate strategically and bring in market facts.
If I'm interpreting her correctly, Nelson is concerned about product managers getting sucked into overly tactical activities such as micromanaging individual iteration deliverables.

I agree. As I've written, product managers often face this problem; there is a tendency for executives to make all of the strategic decisions and relegate the product manager to doing tactical outbound and implementation work. Consequently, companies' strategic decisions are made in a vacuum, without the benefit of market research and sound marketing principles.

Nonetheless, while a product manager should not be managing product development iiterations, I do believe she should be involved in each iteration that results in a user- or buyer-demonstratable deliverable. And, in general, the team should be structuring iterations so that most iterations result in such a demonstratable deliverable.

Indeed, I wrote late last year:
The crux of the matter is that you should be able to demonstrate at the end of an iteration how a customer would use your product to address customer problems. So "working version" doesn't mean one that is ready for sale to the customer, but just one that is ready for demonstration. For a software product, that demonstration might include showing some hard-coded mock-ups in place of screens developers haven't yet implemented.
Think of the product manager's involvement in these iterations as an ongoing dialog with developers about what matters to users and buyers. This dialog benefits developers and avoids the hazards of BUFR.

Comments

Brandon said…
I think scrum and agile do a nice job of breaking these roles into: Product Owner and ScrumMaster/Lead. The owner directs the customer pain points or user stories and the scrummaster owns the day-to-day.
Mon Aug 14, 05:09:00 PM 2006
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Spreadsheets Suck for Prioritizing

The Goal As a company executive, you want confidence that your product team (which includes all the people, from all departments, responsible for product success) has a sound basis for deciding which items are on the product roadmap. You also want confidence the team is prioritizing the items in a smart way. What Should We Prioritize? The items the team prioritizes could be features, user stories, epics, market problems, themes, or experiments. Melissa Perri  makes an excellent case for a " problem roadmap ", and, in general, I recommend focusing on the latter types of items. However, the topic of what types of items you should prioritize - and in what situations - is interesting and important but beyond the scope of this blog entry. A Sad but Familiar Story If there is significant controversy about priorities, then almost inevitably, a product manager or other member of the team decides to put together The Spreadsheet. I've done it. Some of the mos...
32 comments
Read more

5 Ways Companies Make Product Decisions

In the last blog entry, we reviewed the  four problems that companies face, or are trying to overcome, as they make product decisions .  Now we'll look at the ways that most companies make their product decisions. Companies that develop, market, and sell products and solutions make strategic and ongoing tactical decisions.  They decide what features to include in their products, what messages they will use to communicate the value of their products, what marketing tactics they will use, what prospective customers they will target, and many day-to-day choices. Whether or not these decisions are deliberate or ad hoc, most companies use some combination of the following ways of making product decisions. (A downloadable "map" that summarizes the product decision landscape is included at the end of this article.) Customer Wants Product decisions based on feature requests, focus groups, and what prospects and customers say they want. Companies are selling products to ...
12 comments
Read more

Is Customer Development Pseudoscience?

The “Science” of Lean Startup Lean startup practitioners embrace the scientific method, seeking the "truth" about what business model and strategy will lead to product success. We do so by: Formulating hypotheses Crafting and running experiments to test them Learning from the experiments Iteratively feeding our learnings back into revised hypotheses Sounds pretty scientific, at least in spirit, doesn't it? Yet this process actually neglects a key ingredient in the scientists' mode of operation. To identify what’s missing, let’s examine “customer development”. Customer Development Steve Blank is one of the pioneers of the lean startup movement. He introduced into the lean startup lexicon the term “customer development”. Customer development consists of sessions and interactions with customers to test hypotheses. For example, a product manager might interview a prospect, asking if she agrees with the product manager’s hypotheses about the problems she faces or the ...
9 comments
Read more