Most product managers are new to Agile, and many Agilists have misconceptions about product management. The “Product Management” stage will share real-world experience and guidance to teams on delivering successful whole products.
Product managers and product owners are critical to the software development process: identifying markets and customers; defining products; driving and quantifying business value; prioritizing backlogs; writing user stories; convincing customers to buy and executives to invest. We’ve seen Agile scale up to include enterprise revenue-generating solutions. Product owners and product managers are enthusiastically debating their roles.
One of the more crucial roles in agile teams is that of XP Customer or Scrum Product Owner. These are pervasive roles, with aspects that are often debated. Are they part of the team or not? Does their neck get wrung or not? Are they outward focused or inward focused? Do they serve as a leadership voice within the team or not? In this presentation we’ll explore the role of the Agile Product Owner from a role and responsibility (or focus) perspective with an eye towards leadership. Perhaps we’ll find the true north between the titles two polar opposites.
| Presenter(s): | Bob Galen |
| Day and Time: | Tuesday, 10 August 2010, 11:00 - 12:00  |
| Location: | E-2 |
| Level: | Practicing |
Selecting and delivering the most important work is a critical success factor in Agile projects. But how do you know what is important? Unless you are psychic, some help would come in handy. Get a guided tour to a variety of strategies and tools to manage your backlog. Understand the benefits of each approach using a model that puts them in context; learn how to make informed decisions on which to use in your situation. E.g. Innovation Games®, Story Map, Software By Numbers, Kano Analysis. A series of hands-on exercises will help ground your understanding so come ready to play!
| Presenter(s): | Michael Sahota , Gino Marckx |
| Day and Time: | Tuesday, 10 August 2010, 13:30 - 15:00 |
| Location: | E-2 |
| Level: | Introductory |
The greatest cause of failure for new product introductions is not product development (i.e., the product), but in the development of customers and markets. Customer Development is about discovering and learning who your customers are. It’s a parallel process to Product Development only that it is customer and market centric. Session participants can expect an introduction to Customer Development and how the essential roles of Product Management and Agile Development combine to minimize product/market risk.
| Presenter(s): | Barry Paquet |
| Day and Time: | Tuesday, 10 August 2010, 15:30 - 17:00 |
| Location: | E-2 |
| Level: | Practicing |
As agile practices become more prevalent, Product Management divisions face increasing challenges to adapt agile techniques. Most Agile project teams prefer direct collaboration with the strategy makers for decision making over reporting metrics; the reality is that only a few product/portfolio managers are actually capable of paradigm shifts to accommodate this drift. What is needed to make this shift? The paper outlines an agile-enabled framework adopted by the digital division of a publishing house to charter their product roadmap and enable their project team with the “big picture”.
| Presenter(s): | Anupam Kundu |
| Day and Time: | Wednesday, 11 August 2010, 11:00 - 12:00 |
| Location: | E-2 |
| Level: | Practicing |
User stories are a great way to capture requirements and are successfully used in many projects. Every user story comes with a business value and a effort needed to implement the story, usually in software. Since there are almost always more requirements than budget (or any other limiting factor like time, available resources, etc) decisions have to be made on which stories to pick up in which order. Usually the stories are prioritized by the product owner and put on a textual product backlog. We will show how a graphical overview will stimulate the right side of our brains.
| Presenter(s): | Maurits Rijk |
| Day and Time: | Wednesday, 11 August 2010, 11:00 - 12:00 |
| Location: | Asia 3 |
| Level: | Practicing |
The Motley Fool adopted Scrum as the primary development system across the enterprise in December of 2007. Shortly afterward, we developed a simple initiative planning system to help feed our teams work that was aligned with our strategy. In 2010, we launched new portfolio management process that allowed us to better utilize Scrum, as described by Ken Schwaber, for growth initiatives and Kanban, as described by David Anderson and Corey Ladas, for managing KTLO (Keep the lights on) work and other sustaining activities. This interactive session will describe the framework and our findings.
| Presenter(s): | Maxwell Keeler |
| Day and Time: | Wednesday, 11 August 2010, 13:30 - 15:00 |
| Location: | E-2 |
| Level: | Practicing |
Many agile methodologies assume a customer (or product owner) walks into the room with a swack of money and a pile of story cards and tells the development team to start building the functionality described on the top few cards. This tutorial provides an overview of what needs to go on “behind the scenes” between when a project is conceived and when development can start in earnest. It identifies the artifacts that may need to be produced, whether and when they should be produced, which activities can be used to produce them and who should be involved in those activities.
| Presenter(s): | Gerard Meszaros |
| Day and Time: | Wednesday, 11 August 2010, 15:30 - 17:00 |
| Location: | E-2 |
| Level: | Introductory |
| Presentation: | Download Slides |
Product Owner is the most misunderstood and misapplied role in Scrum. The concept barely works on small products... it almost always fails in larger enterprises where many teams work together on complex enterprise deliverables. We hear about people implementing product councils and product owner teams but that seems to miss the point of having single wring-able neck. This talk explores the role of Product Owner and breaks down just what it takes to do this role well. We'll explore a capability driven model for scaling the PO role and keeping us all focused on building the right products.
| Presenter(s): | Mike Cottmeyer |
| Day and Time: | Thursday, 12 August 2010, 09:00 - 10:30 |
| Location: | E-2 |
| Level: | Practicing |
Whether you’re working on a new development effort or the next release of an existing system you need to get your project approved. Many organizations have embraced agile but still follow a traditional project-approval process requiring a complete, up-front project plan including dates, costs, and resources. This tutorial focuses on strategies for overcoming this disconnect of “build in an agile way but still provide all of the same waterfall-like artifacts to get your project approved.”
| Presenter(s): | Kenny Rubin |
| Day and Time: | Thursday, 12 August 2010, 13:30 - 15:00 |
| Location: | E-2 |
| Level: | Practicing |
| Presentation: | Download Slides |
In enterprise situations we have a more complex upstream than a single Product Owner, but rather a Product Owner Team. But a bad PO team can sink an Agile transition. In this session we will talk about how we can bring Agile practices and tools to the upstream processes and how they can help us achieve better agility and visibility outside the development team. . We will explore how POs and Agile Project Managers can use Kanban, Retrospectives and other agile tools and practices to build better PO Teams. We will look at metrics and visibility tools, and discuss flow in these processes.
| Presenter(s): | Inbar Oren |
| Day and Time: | Thursday, 12 August 2010, 15:30 - 17:00 |
| Location: | E-2 |
| Level: | Expert |
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Producer: Rich Mironov
Co-Producer: Scott Gilbert