This document is part of a series of posts which I started in December 2020 to remind myself of experiences and best practices as agile cloud software product owner and manager. I’ll be extending and updating it over time so I would be keen to get your feedback. What are the questions puzzling you?
- Why is balancing desirable, feasible and viable key?
- What is the difference between custom- and standard-software development?
- Why does simplicity take more time?
- Why are organizational debts even worse than requirements gaps or technical debts?
- What are the skills for an enterprise software product manager?
- How to find the right perspective and how to focus on the right requirements?
- How to define & manage a roadmap and convert it into a backlog?
There ain't no truth, just perspectives: What is more important the customer buying the enterprise software or the employee using it? Is an effective business process more important than having users which enjoy working on it?
There is no answer to this question - it's like chicken and egg.
As product manager you need to be able to change your positions to capture all perspectives otherwise you will only understand parts of the problem.
Here are a couple of them:
- Company, process, country, industry
- User, manager, employee, senior, junior, external worker, customer, partner
- B2B, B2C, B2B2C,
- Service-centric, product-centric,
- Marketing, sales, procurement, logistics, production, project,
- Finance, analytics, human capital....
The art of product management and product ownership is to capture the messages from all perspectives and decide which one to rate higher than others. The good news is that perspectives can be changed quicker than convictions or beliefs which might turn into a blocker for innovation or reason for conflicts.
You need to find and listen the signals and filter it out from the background noise. Don't think the loudest or closest signal is always the right one to follow otherwise you might end up not doing the right thing.
…to be continued
While you are are giving me feedback and propose topics, questions and links to be added here are a couple of links which inspired me. Looking forward to hearing from you either if you like my thoughts or not – as Lenny Leonard said “Everybody makes mistakes. That’s why they put erasers on pencils” ;o)
Message from Christian Klein
The life of a product manager in GIFs
Not having a plan is not agile
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.
We seek, not to know the answers…but to understand the questions
- SAP Managed Tags:
