Agile Product Management:  The Problem and Solutions

presented by Peter Ghali of iContact

session notes taken by "Dan Puckett" <dan@virtueofthesmall.com>

An audience poll indicated that most in the audience were familiar with Agile and project management.

Preferred software development process:  Waterfall 15%, Agile 38%.

Agile founders had relatively homogeneous backgrounds:  engineering, computer science, physics.

How does the Product Manager role bolt onto Agile?

Product owner -- internally focussed

Product manager -- externally focussed

Scrum master and product manager work with the scrum team.

In Peter Ghali's experience, in Agile, Product Manager is full-time tactical.

When the engineers need you, you can't look away.  On the other hand, you can't keep the executives waiting either.

Product owner's job encompasses both the current sprint and any remaining sprints for this release.

Product manager's job encompasses both remaining sprints for release and any roadmap features after this release.

"Minimally Marketable Features" (MMF) are the musts-of-the-musts.  That is, each goal has things you absolutely must provide to reach that goal, and each of those things contains must-do things as well.  The MMFs represent only those things without which the release would be pretty much worthless.

Prioritizing your features

• Prioritize by benefit:  theme screening, theme scoring, benefit vs. cost:  relative weighting value/cost analysis
• Finding the "Wow" features:  Kano analysis