Three Big Mistakes to Avoid When the Team Goes Agile

Here are some of the worst mistakes we've seen - the kind that cause product development efforts to flounder, product managers to lose sleep, hair (or their jobs) and erstwhile agile teams to act non-agile.

1. Try to clone the PM, without the cloning part
Some companies are trying to have Product Managers fill the product owner AND product manager roles. It's difficult to manage both the strategic oversight and day-to-day development detail when one product is involved; it's just about impossible to do with multiple products. The fix: Know your strength - is it primarily in strategic planning or in day-to-day detail? Pick one role, and identify someone else in the organization who can fill (or help you fill) the other role. Otherwise, there's a good chance you'll fall short in both. Need we say more? We will next month, in terms of negotiating this shift.

2. Forget to do strategic planning
Any product manager worth his or her salt knows that Agile is not a magic bullet to make all up-front planning go away. You still need to create business cases to justify a product development effort, you still need to develop product vision and a product roadmap, and you still need to keep tabs on the market through market sizing, segmentation and competitive analysis. Agile development teams tend to forget this - help them remember why it's critical. One way to do this is to recap your company's last product development failure where up-front planning was bypassed. (We bet you can find at least one example.)

3. Forget that you're the chicken, not the pig
Scrum literature reminds us that the product owner is "involved" (as a chicken is "involved" in producing breakfast eggs), but is not "committed" (as the pig is "committed" to providing breakfast ham). This means that you need to make sure that you, as product owner, are providing the prioritized user stories and test criteria they need to deliver. But it also means that the product development team, not you, ultimately is accountable to delivering on the sprint.

We'll provide more insights in next month's Pivot Point newsletter. In the meantime, we've partnered with SDForum to offer a three-part Teleworkshop series on Agile Product Management. Join us for the live sessions on July 15, 22 and 29 - recorded sessions will be available afterward too. For more information click here.