(From my year-end email)
This year I’ve moved from Citi to AIG. I’m a Product Manager doing Agile Development. Some definitions:
- Product Manager: Product Managers are the owners of products, setting the goals of products and ensuring they are met. We manage the product, not the people (i.e., the coders). It’s common for the business to need one thing and technology to deliver something else. The product manager is there to ensure that the technology team effectively meets the needs of the business. For a non-technology example of miscommunication of business needs take a look at this cake or this one
- Agile Development: People used to think that you should build software like you build a building. You make detailed plans and then take years to build it. However, we’ve realized over the years that we can solve most key business problems without building the whole software project — we just build the parts that matter. Also, people can start using the software before it’s done — which lets us revise the plans on a regular basis as we see how it’s used
Some resources:
- A product manager is like the producer of a film. Building on that idea, I’ve extracted a number of product management lessons from Pixar
- A great short video from South Park on the importance of planning. First, we steal the underpants … third, we make a profit.
- At big companies, it’s important to communicate the value that a product manager is bringing to the organization to avoid having others take the credit
- Here’s a couple of thoughts on what to build first:
- Overviews
- Cracking the PM Interview is a great book for people looking to get into the field
- Jeff Patton’s book User Story Mapping is extremely helpful in understanding user needs and breaking them down into pieces that can be built
- Mike Cohn has some useful videos to get you up to speed on Agile. They’re a few years old from the Norwegian Developers Conference
- Some great resources to keep you up to speed: Ken Norton’s Bringing the Donuts, Mind the Product’s Prioritized Newsletter and AlphaHQ’s large set of useful resources