Last night I attended a meeting of the XP Toronto chapter, a usergroup of developers who use the extreme programming methodology to develop software products. I was part of a Product Management Panel with Saeed Khan (from Platespin) and Lee Garrison (from Riverdale Partners).

The purpose of our panel was to talk about what product managers do (and shouldn’t do), and how product management works inside an agile environment. For those of you who read the blog, you know that recently we moved to the agile methodology here at Tucows.

I got a lot of questions about why we moved to agile. People wanted to know what pain brought us to the point of realizing that iterative development was the way to go. Some of the reasons I shared  - we weren’t able to reach our goals fast enough; we took so long spec-ing a product that it was not salient when it got to market; and we couldn’t easily change mid-course.

We discussed a lot about what Product Managers should do. (Shouldn’t do included things like managing bugs, picking button colours on interfaces etc.) Most of the discussion about the role of product management came from the methodology we follow at Tucows (as did the rest of my panel - the Pragmatic Marketing approach. This is a market driven approach to product management. Its main mantra is to fully understand your market. To talk to your customers, your prospects, your competitors, and other market influencers to fully be able to articulate what the market needs to the customer.

When this is done well, it makes for a really great product.

When you combine a market approach with an agile process, I think you get the best of both worlds. One of my fellow panelists spoke about agile coming around out of frustration by developers, and pragmatic methodology of the frustration in product management, and I think that makes a lot of sense.  By understanding the market well, and responding to changes in the market, you can release something that really works for your customers.   The two releases that Tucows has coming out this month (email that you already know about and another coming shortly…I’ll leave that as a surprise) are real results of listening to the market, and adjusting our course as we learned more and delivering using the agile methodology.  It is really encouraging to be on a couple of those teams and feel the energy that comes out of a team working in an agile environment. It’s amazing to see people so committed to a release.

Posted on Wednesday, June 13th, 2007 at 3:17 pm by Kim Phelan.
Filed under: General.
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