Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant
Expert in Managing Product Development
Dave, the tech lead, was trying to use an agile approach with his team. Four of the people worked together in a team room in Waltham, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb. Two people worked from their homes in New Hampshire, and one person, the product owner, worked from her home in Indiana. Their agile approach wasn’t …
Continue reading “Distributed Team Workspaces Start With Hours of Overlap”
Summary: Too often, customers have a “fake certainty” about the problems they want to solve. They might not have defined the real problem, but they have frequently defined the solution anyway. The risk is that we might build the wrong thing. When the product owner works with the customers to define the problem, then works …
Continue reading “Eliminate Fake Certainty and Solve the Real Problem”
Summary: Many managers and distributed team members think that if they just had the right tools, they could make some agile approach work. Maybe, but tools only enhance the work of a collaborative agile team. Before you select tools, make sure you have people who can work together and have enough skills and capabilities for …
Continue reading “For Distributed Agile Teams, It’s Not All about the Tools”
I started this series discussing the issue of the various product-based roles in an agile organization. I suggested a product value team because one person becomes a bottleneck. One person is unlikely to shepherd the strategy and the tactics for a product. And, batching the product planning in one-quarter chunks doesn’t encourage us to reduce …
Continue reading “Product Roles, Part 6: Shorten Feedback Loops”
As I’ve written these product role posts, a number of you have asked about how to use component teams. You might have a security team. Maybe a performance team. Regardless of my desire, you have component teams. You want a more agile approach to manage the interdependencies among the teams. You want to be able …
Continue reading “Product Roles, Part 5: Component Teams to Create Slices”
Many people in the agile community promote a product orientation over a project orientation. That’s possible because an organization has product or feature teams. That works until you have more products than teams. That’s when you might still need projects to accomplish everything. If you keep teams together, you can still use projects in a …
Continue reading “Product Roles, Part 4: Product Orientation and the Role of Projects”
An agile approach requires a cross-functional team. That means that everyone on the team focuses on the same intent. That intent might be an entire product. It might be a feature set as part of a larger program. But, the team focuses as a team. That cross-functional team is a product team or a feature …
Continue reading “Product Roles, Part 3: Product or Feature Teams vs Project Teams”
In an ideal agile world, the team would work directly with a customer. When you have a small product that serves maybe three types of customer (new, expert, admin for example), and that customer is down the figurative hall, you might not need any product people. You can create short feedback loops with your customer. …
Continue reading “Product Roles, Part 2: The Product Value Team”
We have many words for people who shepherd the business value of a product. The many words aren’t a problem, as long as we can all agree on what these various people are and they take responsibility for. When we don’t agree, we run the risk of not managing our strategy, not thinking in terms …
Continue reading “Product Roles, Part 1: Product Managers, Product Owners, Business Analysts”
You’ve got interdependencies across the organization for a given project or program to release a product. You can see demos. That’s not the problem. You need enough insight or prediction to start the marketing campaign or to create training videos or product documentation. You need some kind of milestone criteria so you know you can complete …
Continue reading “Agile Milestone Criteria for Projects and Programs”