Cauvin

Join me Saturday, August 6th, 2011 for ProductCamp Austin 7 .  ProductCamp is an "unconference" where  product management and marketing professionals teach, learn, and network. Along with a team that included John Milburn , Scott Sehlhorst , and founder Paul Young , I attended and helped organize the first ProductCamp Austin .  This time, assuming our proposed session makes the cut, we'll be leading a panel discussion on the future of product management. You've heard the traditional challenges product managers face ( basing product decisions on market problems , leadership without formal authority , getting buried in tactical tasks).  But product management has grown up, and there are new challenges we face.  What is the future of product management, and how will it address these new challenges? Austin's "Gang of Four" product managers will lead an interactive conversation on such topics as: 1.  We've gone agile.  Do we still need product man...

The following is a fictitious example of the type of conversation that could occur at many organizations claiming to use agile development methods. Joan is the VP of engineering at Trendy Startup, a rapidly-expanding company developing a suite of cloud storage products and services. Joan's organization uses the popular scrum development process to develop its products. Product managers and owners create user stories, allocate them to iterations and releases, and manage them in backlogs.  Quality assurance (QA) engineers write tests for the user stories, and developers implement the user stories.  Team members meet daily to review the previous day's accomplishments, agree on what they'll do today, and surface any obstacles they are facing. Joan is proud of her teams and their adoption of agile methods and practices.  She touts the Trendy Startup's development processes to her fellow executives and to prospects and customers. All members of her product teams hav...