Becoming a Pro at Product Management

Have you ever come across the term 'Agile Methodology?

What was the first thing that came to mind?

Let me guess - a method that requires you to be on your feet, maybe literally running around to ensure the team meets up with a deadline?

You're not far from the truth if this is what you thought.

The goal of every product manager is to ensure the effective and timely delivery of tasks/value by all stakeholders of a product.

Speaking plainly, the agile method involves a team/stakeholders collaborating to work on a product while making deliverables.

The agile method facilitates communication, autonomy, mutual respect and trust amongst all members of the team while collaborating to achieve a product goal. These are the core concepts of agile product development.

Core Agile Manifestoes in Product Development

An agile method of product development prioritizes the individuals within the software development team and their interaction, putting them above the tools and processes that they use in the process.

Documentation is all well and good because they contain the details and nitty-gritty. However, as comprehensive as the documentation may be, they are given less importance, because Agile prioritizes coming up with working prototypes. This means that an agile product manager will only make comprehensive documentation needed to kickstart the product plan and channel more energy to ensure that the team comes up with an actual product.

An agile product manager will, however, ensure that the product requirement document will nevertheless, be updated to adapt to any iterations made throughout the timeframe.

Agile Frameworks

There are four basic agile frameworks known as Kanban, Lean, Extreme Programming and Scrum.

Kanban includes continuous work wherein team members have an idea of work done, been done and to be done.
Lean aims at reducing cost and increasing productivity.
Extreme Programming provides strict conditions for work to be done.
Scrum is an iterative means of getting work done through a set of principles and values.

The Scrum Framework

Scrum is the most commonly used framework because it requires every member of the team to deliver on their tasks together and at the same time.

A product manager uses Scrum when there is, more often than not, a sprint and teammates need to adapt to iterations while making continuous improvements.

Sprint - A sprint is a specific period usually one month or less wherein members of a team deliver on their tasks.

When you need your team to naturally adapt to continuous change and constantly improve on their work, scrum is the best framework to apply.

In the Scrum process there are three main roles/accountabilities:

Product Owner: serves as the link between customers and the development team.
Scrum Master: responsible for driving the project, owning the process, and ensuring that the team maintains Agile principles and practices.
Team Member: an individual contributor on a cross-functional development team.

Scrum Artifacts

As you get introduced to Scrum, you would realize that there are certain constants in a sprint. They include;

The Product backlog - This refers to the list of work that must be done, in order of priority. It is simply the to-do list of Sprint.
The Sprint Backlog - covers all action points of the sprint. These are essentially the requirements that must be fulfilled or met.
The Sprint Goal is the usable end product from the sprint.

Scrum Activities

There are certain events that more often than not will be done in a sprint. These events will be done in an orderly manner as stated earlier scrum deals with values and principles. These events include

Organizing the Backlog both product and sprint backlogs to map out tasks/deliverables.
Planning the Sprint to determine the outcome and means of achieving the same.
The Sprint itself is the predefined time allocated to achieve the sprint.
Daily Stand Up which involves daily check-ins throughout cross-functional teams.
Sprint Review which includes reviewing work done and giving feedback on the quality of work done, acceptance criteria are checked, and the definition of done is emphasized.
Sprint Retrospective is the same as a sprint is done by everyone in the team at the end of each sprint to determine setbacks and improvements to make in the future to facilitate progress and efficiency.

If you want your next product development project to be people-focused and result-oriented, then using agile methodologies is something you should consider seriously and using these tips and knowledge that I shared with you will bring you one step closer to being a Pro at it.