What is agile product management?

First things first, agile is not a process but a value system, a philosophy that has been incorporated into the software development lifecycle.

Imagine you are building a product. You will have a product vision, roadmap with a list of features that can be used by your target users. Agile methodology equips you to transform this product roadmap and business strategies into short development cycles.

Any product is not constant, it evolves with the market and customer need. Once the product is launched to users, based on their feedback , another cycle of product iterations and new feature developments happen. Therefore it's a repetitive cycle going through the same loop of building and improvement.

Hence agile product product management is a method that is focused on continuously improving the product in an iterative , lean and quick manner.

The core benefit of agile product management is that it is very customer focussed. It has the ability to respond very fast to any user feedback because only those features are picked by developers which are most valuable for customers and businesses. This happens through the rigorous process of Prioritisation, which we will discuss shortly.

Agile methodology in product management and product lifecycle

Once you have understood the core value of agile, it is now time to understand how will you apply these to your next product development lifecycle (PDLC).

There are many agile methodologies like Scrum, Kanban, SAFE, XP, etc. However, for the purpose of this article, we shall be focussing on the most popular framework i.e. Scrum

Scrum is a method that puts the agile principles into practice by allowing the teams to work in an iterative agile way, to achieve a common goal. This happens by breaking the process into dedicated time slots called ‘sprints’. The duration of sprints is mostly 2 weeks but can vary from one organization to the other.

The purpose of the sprint is to maximize quality software development and for that, there are a couple of recurring meetings that form part of the agile ceremony.

• 1. Sprint Planning — This is the time when planning the team’s work for the next sprint happens. Typically product features are broken down into user stories which are assigned to different developers in the team
• 2. Daily Standups — These are short 10–15 min meetings whose major objective is to understand : what was completed yesterday , what the team is working on today and if there is any blockage that requires discussion. This helps to keep everyone updated on progress and brings transparency and accountability into the process.
• 3. Backlog Grooming and Estimation — The team first prioritizes and cleans the backlog based on business and technical learnings. The different user stories are then estimated by assigning a score against them, which is a measure of time and effort it will take to complete it. This is to ensure that none of the team members are under or overworked with an equivalent distribution of story points.
• 4. Sprint Review — It is time to demo the progress made by the team with all the relevant stakeholders
• 5. Sprint Retro — It is the meeting where the team retrospects on the prior sprint. They discuss the things that went well, that did not go well, along with the learnings and growth opportunities for future sprints.

If these ceremonies are followed diligently with the team, scrum can be a powerful process that supports focused agile development and provides ample opportunity for effective iteration.

Agile roles & responsibilities of a product manager

Some of the key functions that PM’s have in a typical agile system are :

• Owners of Product Vision
  Product manager is the owner of product vision in an agile setup. They keep the team focussed on the end destination, even while the journey to reach that destination might keep changing.
• Backlog grooming or Backlog management
  A product backlog is basically all the tasks that could not be completed or picked up in the previous sprints. So maintenance of this list to ensure that the development team picks up the most important tasks.
• Stakeholder management
  Product managers participate in daily scrums, standups, sprint planning, and retrospectives and make sure that the team is not blocked due to any confusion.
• Roadmap Management
  Roadmap as the name suggests is a map of the journey from Destination A to B. For products, it is a list of all the features, that will help in achieving the product vision. To keep it updated, and aligned to business and user requirements, is key to roadmap management.
• Prioritization
  When building features in short development cycles, we can't pick all features together. That is where priority is assigned against every feature based on different criteria and frameworks (RICE, Moscow, Kano). The objective is however to maximize user and business gain.

In agile systems, you will also hear roles like Product Owner , Scrum master. While these roles are more towards managing projects towards completion, through close collaboration with the teams on a day-to-day basis, but there can be instances where PM’s have to step into their shoes based on the company size, stage, and need.

Benefits of agile product management

Business

• 1. High speed of delivery with its simplicity is core to agile methodology
• 2. Changing requirements of users and businesses can also be accommodated due to shorter development cycles, keeping the product quality high
• 3. Reduced Risk since it allows you to build fast and fail fast when the cost and scale is low. Imagine building the entire project and then encountering a failure.

Users

• 1. Customers satisfaction is high due to continuous improvement of the products through incremental changes
• 2. Keeps the user engaged and refreshed with new changes and improvements

Teams

• 1. There is high collaboration between teams through daily standups, keeping everyone updated on the progress of the project along with avoiding any blockages and communication gaps
• 2. Sprint retrospectives also help the team analyze their shortcoming and improve collectively
• 3. There is much higher control over the project due to increased visibility. Tools like Jira also bring huge transparency and accountability to the system

Hence if you are a founder or a Product Manager with the requirement of rapid development under tight deadlines, then agile product management is your answer.

If you are an aspiring Product manager and want to level up your learning journey then do check out PM School’s course. It is an 8-week hands-on learning program from industry’s seasoned mentors. Consisting of live classes, 1 on 1 dedicated mentorship, guidance on PM interviews, the course will certainly craft you into a skilled product manager post 2 months.

The PM School Program also has a detailed module on Agile Product management fundamentals. You can further read about the program here.

‍