Agile*Product*AI

The success of agile approaches depends on how close you are to your customer. This is an indisputable fact. So, if you’re an independent software vendor (ISV) that is producing commercial software products (like me at Pacific Edge Software), then how do I get my customer "on the team?" It’s likely not possible or practical and this is where effective Product Management kicks in. The Product Manager (PM) is the proxy for the customer on an agile team in an ISV or for that matter any company building products for customers that they are at least once removed from. Being on an agile team will change how a product manager elaborates and drives their product to market. And I've had some interesting challenges on retooling classically schooled PMs (some of them didn't make required adjustments and didn't survive the organizational change). While the roles and responsibilities are the same, the behavior patterns must change. The PM is integrated into the development tea...

User Stories and Epics are inadequate to capture and express critical elements of product design.  User Stories are fine grained and atomic – remember they are “implementable” within a single Sprint.  Epic Stories tend to be semantic free containers of Stories.  Creating sophisticated applications with rich application interfaces requires pre-production activities to validate Epic and User Stories with product design considerations such as usability and architecture.  We experienced this on our latest project.  Ironically, this was while building an Agile On Demand solution for work management for teams (and teams of teams) using agile methods to create software!  The team had been Sprinting together for quite some time.  Probably in the neighborhood of 15 or more 3 week Sprints that included 3 releases to production of a SaaS product.  As we approached the completion of the third release, we started getting pretty clear feedback from some team me...