I’m writing this post spurred by 2 things:

1. A real-life story I heard from the VP of Product Management at a large tech company in California. He gave me approval to share his story, as long as I anonymized it & avoided any details specific to his industry. Many thanks to him for the approval.
2. A very insightful blog post by Jeff Lash of Sirius Decisions & my ensuing Twitter conversations with Jeff, Roger Cauvin, and others.

“Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.” – Benjamin Franklin

As some of you know, I regularly speak with Product Management executives at mid-to-large companies as a part of my job at Accompa.

About 7 weeks ago, I had a very interesting conversation with the VP of Product Management at a large tech company in California. Let us call him Steve (not his real name, I’m anonymizing it per his request).

Steve’s story is a cautionary tale for Product Management (PM) teams everywhere. While I’ve heard “lighter” versions of this story before, this story is very stark & so is good to learn from. Without further ado, here’s the story… [Read more…]

Engineering teams at more and more companies are using some form of Agile development process. I’ve seen a lot of discussion on the internet on how Product Management (PM) teams can adapt to this Agile world.

PM teams at a lot of companies use our requirements software – so I also get questions from our customers about how best their product managers can work with their Agile development teams.

In this post, I’d like to share my evolving thoughts on this topic.

BTW – One of the questions that is often discussed on this topic is:

How can Product Management teams follow Agile process?

I believe this is the wrong question! I will explain why in this post too.

[Read more…]