Wednesday, January 03, 2007

Agile Product Management

Today, development managers and I had a great discussion on how to manage the migration process. Following were a few questions:

1. A few engineers are already on a Scrum team and the question was how to migrate the rest of the team. Since there are only 11 engineers in total, should we just do one team or break into 2 teams. Would one team be able to handle and manage 6 different products?

2. We have near constant interrupts from Client Services, Pre-Sales regarding existing products and issues. Every issue, for these guys, is always life & death issue. Would we able to help the teams focus on the sprint goals without getting interrupted?

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Agile Product Management in SMB

As a product manager for a small software company, I don't have much stomach for long release cycles that our development team traditionally delivered. I also know that, as the process of product marketing feeds into product planning, the faster these cycles turns, the better for me.

So, if I can get my developers to migrate to agile development process (Scrum specifically) and really primed for faster turned around times, I will have more opportunities to understand and deliver what our customers are looking for.