How do agile and product management relate to digital transformations?Īs part of a digital transformation, your organization applies technology to provide your customers with more interaction with your business processes. Most product management practices and techniques center on understanding customers and their needs and deciding which problems to solve for customers.Ĭurrent product management thinking also encourages product teams to be much more outcome-focused – measuring progress on what problems you solve.īecause agile software development approaches have little to say on what to build, many organizations using agile approaches without a strong product management influence focus more on output. Product management places a much bigger focus on determining what to build, specifically the strategy and discovery aspects of product development. When there is information about identifying what to build, it’s usually in the guise of how to organize that information to make developers’ lives easier. Most of the common agile frameworks assign responsibility for deciding what to build to a representative of the customer or “management” but they don’t specify how to make those decisions. It addresses how software development teams work together and the engineering practices they use to build software. The two concepts differ primarily in their focus on aspects of the product development lifecycle.Īgile software development focuses on optimizing the delivery process. In fact, you could say agile approaches that have cross-functional collaboration and iterating to deal with uncertainty as core tenets heavily influenced current approaches to product management. Product management works best when your cross-functional product team practices continuous customer discovery to learn more about the problem you’re trying to solve. You couldn’t figure out everything you needed to know without going through the act of building it.Ĭompanies that adopted agile software development formed cross-functional teams to build software instead of pulling a temporary group of people together from a bunch of silos. The fundamental similarities between product management and agile come from their approach to work.Īgile software development stressed the need for iteration and continuous learning during software development. The two concepts are complementary activities that are both necessary to get a satisfactory outcome. Comparing product management and agileĪs you can see, product management and agile are both critical aspects of product development. You build the thing right by collaboratively and iteratively developing a solution using good software development practices. According to the Agile Alliance, agile software development is “an umbrella term for a set of frameworks and practices based on the values and principles expressed in the Manifesto for Agile Software Development and the 12 Principles behind it.” When comparing and contrasting with product management, agile is usually shorthand for agile software development. What is agile?Īgile is the ability to respond to an uncertain and turbulent environment by creating and responding to change. The “right thing” is a product that offers a viable, usable, and feasible solution to a problem that your customer needs solved. Identify a solution that’s feasible for you to deliver, given the time, skills, and technology you have available.Create a solution that’s usable for your customers.Solve those customer problems when it’s viable for your organization.Identify problems that your customers find value in having solved.Product management is helping your customers solve problems in a way that is beneficial for your organization.Įffective product management involves working with a stable cross-functional team to address four major risks : That probably doesn’t paint the full picture, so here’s a bit more on each. In product development, product management is about building the right thing, and agile (software development) is about building the thing right. Properly applied agile approaches help you build products faster, but you need to apply product management properly to ensure you’re building (or not building) the right thing. Teams often believe that if they adopt agile approaches they’ll be able to build the right software products faster and cheaper. When you explore things from the perspective of software product development, agile and product management are not the same thing, but they have a strong overlap. Multiple leaders involved with digital transformations have asked us “what’s the difference between agile and product management? Aren’t they the same thing?”
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |