I’ve finally finished adding two submissions to the 2009 Agile Alliance conference. My first submission is my very popular “Prioritizing for Profit” talk on how a product manager should approach the prioritization of a backlog based on backlog items that drive profit and avoid ROI prioritization schemes. My second submission, Leveraging Collaborative Ideation and Decision Making Technologies, is a new talk about an emerging class of tools that help distributed Agile teams in collaborative ideation and prioritization activities.

Since the selected papers are based on what people submit, and since I care enough about Agile Product Management that I created the leading company on the subject, I thought I’d take a look at the submissions to the Agile Product Management stage that Enthiosys’ own Rich Mironov is producing.

What an incredible disappointment.

Instead of seeing submissions that address the full range of product management issues, I’m seeing submissions that clump into a few small categories, all of which can be summed up as “product management through the eyes of a product owner”. These are:

• Lots of talks about the backlog, but not many talks about market research
• Lots of talks about the backlog, not many talks about making money from your work (other than mine)
• Lots of talks about role definition and team structure (important)

C’mon people—one more time—a real product manager does more than manage a backlog. A real product manager does a whole plethora of things (if you’re confused, visit our partner Pragmatic Marketing).

So, how about some submissions on:

• win/loss analysis in Agile and how frequent releases can stop losses faster once patterns are found
• sales collateral in Agile and how you need to stop printing materials when faster releases makes them obsolete
• market segmentation in Agile and how Agile can help you create finer-tuned segments
• buyer personas in Agile and how market feedback (releases) tunes your sales processes
• market research in Agile (listen up! there is more than Kano and Innovation Games!)
• pricing strategies in Agile (should I raise my price every release? why or why not?)

My main point is that I’m very concerned that the Agile conference is still thinking about Product Management through from the vantage point of a product owner. That’s just wrong. I’ll try to make a few more submissions to compensate for this. In the meantime, if you read my blog, and you’re an AGILE PRODUCT MANAGER, please, submit, on something other than managing a backlog. (And, if you really do think that being an Agile Product Manager is primarily about managing your backlog… submit to another stage).

More at: www.enthiosys.com