The Product Manager In "YOU"

Reasons why Agile Isn’t   Working? A couple drawings… I was visiting a relative a couple years ago. My poor cousin (the CEO of a company) had been sold the Agile Silver Bullet ™ and was pissed. He said something like: It’s a sham! We changed the way we do everything. We brought in consultants. We hired these master project managers. And nothing worked! It made no difference. There’s no accountability. All I get is excuses I forget how I responded, but I know how I’d respond today. I’d draw some pictures and not even mention the word Agile. There are a couple core concepts I’d need to communicate to him…. 1. Flow Efficiency First, if we look at lead time — the time from when we dream up an idea, until it reaches customers — you’ll notice that most of the time is spent “waiting”. 15%  flow efficiency  (work time / lead time) is normal. Crazy, right? Yet we focus on what’s (relatively) visible…the small amount of time spent actually doing the job. The...

Both new and experienced product managers often ask where this role came from and why it seems to have so much crossover with other roles such as Marketing and UX. While there’s no definitive history of product management, it’s often useful to consider our roots and understand how the role evolved over time. If nothing else it helps to understand the organisational trade-offs that happen as our capabilities and thinking evolve. The History Neil McElroy Modern product management started in 1931 with a memo written by  Neil H. McElroy  at Procter & Gamble. It started as a justification to hire more people (sound familiar to any product managers out there?) but became a cornerstone in modern thinking about brand management and ultimately product management. What he laid out in  his 800 word memo  was a simple and concise description of “Brand Men” and their absolute responsibility for a brand – from tracking sales to managing the product, advertising an...

“What is the difference between a Product Owner and a Product Manager?” It’s an interesting question and one that takes time to unpack. Let’s look at where these terms and disciplines originated from and how some common frameworks explain them. When I started my career, I was called a Business Analyst. I did very little “business analysis” as we would look at it in traditional IT companies. I was tasked with gathering the requirements from sales, coming up with a solution, designing it, and then shipping the specification document to development to be built. I went on being called a Business Analyst as I worked at various Industry backgrounds & companies. I wasn’t called a Product Manager until I bailed out of that and landed in my own startup. It was all the same work I had been doing before, but now it had a different name. I liked this name. “Product Manager” seemed to have gravitas to it, and when I looked at other tech companies in the Valley, I could see a clear ca...