Three MORE Big Mistakes to Avoid When the Team Goes Agile
Continuing our series from June’s Pivot Point, here are three more common problems we’ve seen when teams go Agile, and our suggested remedies.
Going Agile may sound simple, but the teams we’ve worked with have found a few stumbling blocks. Here are three more very common but very fixable issues that you may be encountering.
4. Combining Product Manager and Product Owner roles
Many organizations fall into the trap of assuming that Product Managers can handle the Product Owner role. They often they have the skills, but are not prepared for the increased work load associated with this role on an Agile development team. If detailed requirements and specifications are not your strength, look around in the organization to find others with those talents. In many organizations, we’ve seen Business Analysts partner with Product Managers to cover the Product Owner role. If this strategy won’t work for your situation, then you’ll need to reduce the number of products you manage in order to take on Product Owner responsibilities.
5. Not respecting the team’s estimates and velocity when participating in sprint planning
We know some “hard ball” product managers who pride themselves on their negotiating skills – they always get the most out of their dev teams in terms of feature commitments. At least, that’s what they think on the front end; actual delivery is often very different.
The really big revolution with Agile is the transparency in team productivity, measured by velocity. Product Managers need to support this Agile practice in their dev team by encouraging them to measure velocity, and respecting their story estimates and sprint commitments. Participating in backlog grooming and estimating, you clarify each story’s intent and do a little negotiating, but the days of pressuring a dev team beyond their comfort zone are gone. You’ll know in just a few weeks whether they can deliver what you wanted!
6. Confusing Agile’s definition of ‘release’ with Marketing’s definition of ‘release’
This issue is one facing every commercial software organization that we work with. When planning Agile releases, Product Managers need to coordinate with Marketing Communications, Sales, and Support to make sure the timing of the software availability and its launch is optimal. Even though the Agile dev team is likely to finish up and release the software on time, the rest of the organization may need additional time to prepare, or may want to time the launch to fit better with market conditions. In some cases, this means that the dev team needs to be content to “put the release on the shelf” until the rest of the organization is ready for the product to go into general availability.
Join us to find solutions to these and other issues in our three-part Teleworkshop series on Agile Product Management, July 15, 22, and 29. If you miss a live session, you can view the recorded version at your convenience.
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