The Agile Commons Blog

As a product owner at Rally, I work with business stakeholders who have gotten used to using tight scope control to enable us to solve more customer problems.  Many agile product managers prioritize ruthlessly to deliver "minimum credible" features to market quickly and then respond to feedback from customers.     

It's a great way to generate business value, but it can be a tricky balancing act.  Sometimes, "minimum credible" gets pushed too far, and teams release incomplete features that frustrate their customers.  On August 6th at the Agile 2008 conference in Toronto, I'll be presenting a session called "Building Great Products, Incrementally", where we'll explore how an effective agile product manager can tightly manage scope, deliver features fast, and make time to refine designs and incorporate customer feedback.

We've learned a lot over the last few years about how to balance new development, feedback, and debt management to satisfy stakeholders while building a product that gets better with each small release.  In Toronto, I'll be talking about some of the common mistakes made by Product Owners for agile teams, like:

• Assuming all requests can be prioritized in a single backlog   
• Focusing all bandwidth on a subset of your real stakeholders
• Not leaving time to incorporate customer feedback
• Forgetting to need to make regular payments on your "Customer Debt"

Hopefully participants will leave with a good sense of the key challenges in long-term agile product management, as contrasted with shorter-term agile projects, and have some good techniques for managing stakeholder expectations in an agile world and blending together backlogs of different granularities.

See you there!