on New Product Management

by ezs | Jan 7, 2007 | Evangelism, Technology, Uncategorized

An interesting post by Charles Zedlewski of SAP on Product Management. He also references Storm Grillin – another blog on ‘agile Product Management’.

Especially interesting; we had training from Pragmatic Marketing a few weeks ago – which was a good refresher.

Here are the interesting comments; readers at Novell – I’m pointing fingers at you.

a product manager needs to be:
A salesperson. Selling the vision of the product to the development team is essential. How else can they come up with lots of good feature ideas or believe in the priorities? More energy is spent explaining the “why” of the product versus the “what.” 

This also means a product manager should not be:
A document generator. Why bother to generate that 100 page PRD? It’s going to change a month into the project anyhow.

These shifts in focus also change the psychic rewards for the product manager. Most product managers I’ve known love being the satisfaction of being resident expert.

and from Storm Grillin’

Agile product development is all about focusing on real value and delivering it as quickly and measurably as possible.  Many times this means we focus on story cards and use cases and velocity.  But on Monday, the dev, qa, and support folks took things to a completely new level.  They wanted to talk about the business.  They wanted to understand the key metrics that determine financial success, and they wanted to measure their progress against those metrics!

 Interesting thoughts.