by Alo Mukerji

Agile practices are everywhere now. Like the rest of the tech world, I have welcomed the many benefits that practicing Agile offers.

But there’s something missing in all the conversations about Agile: The impact it has not on development but on product management. Specifically, what does it mean for a product manager and how the requirements of that role may have changed due to Agile practices.

Lots of flavors

Speaking to my own experience and what I have heard from other product managers that have not only gone through the transition, but have been practicing for a few years. And it seems clear to me that the product manager role has required some adjusting. It’s also worth noting as I read in Marty Cagan’s book “Inspired,” the origins of Agile come from custom software development where, in fact, there is often no product manager role because the customer provides the custom requirements.

A tough transition

Going back to my past as a product manager when I was introduced to Agile in 2005, I remember exactly how I felt. Having previously used waterfall methods, my initial reaction was negative. I didn’t care if it improved the “agility” of development ten-fold. What immediately affected me was that I had to start thinking in smaller iterations, continuously maintain a backlog, and write user stories instead of requirements.

Frankly I didn’t love thinking in this way. I preferred to think about the entire user experience not just a chunk of it. And I didn’t really like focusing on multi-week sprints either. I was thinking more bigger picture – - focused on the whole product. Plus I was rapidly using up the time that I had set aside for market analysis or customer research to creating a user stories pipeline and backlog maintenance. That one really irked me. Am I not supposed to be focused on my market?

What I went through was likely just the growing pains of implementing a new process and after a while, I grew to enjoy the benefits that Agile practices provide you with (more on that later) and adapted to the process itself. But in speaking with numerous other product managers over the years, I think some of the fundamental issues still exist. Shouldn’t a product manager be thinking out longer than 3 week sprints? How much time and energy should we spend on long-term planning given that we still want to maintain “agility” in our plans? How close can I really stay to the customer when I am so focused on execution? And how do we fit UX into all of this? I would be surprised if most product managers have not asked these questions at some point even if they are working in a company that has figured out a solid, working Agile model.

React quicker to market feedback

On the flip side, as a product owner, Agile gives you the ability to react quicker to market feedback, which means you can more quickly provide features and functionality to make the user’s experience better. For that reason alone, Agile makes so much sense because I always think that delivering a good experience to the user is any product person’s most important job.

My goal is to start a conversation about ways to optimize agile methods and product management’s role in an agile environment.  I look or you comments and experiences as well – please send along your thoughts on what has worked or not in your own companies.

In a later post on Agile, I’ll discuss the benefits of Agile and how to plan in the long-term.