It’s not a very unusual path to jump from project management to product management. Many of our speakers have broken into product using this exact road. One of the biggest challenges in this leap is learning what agile process and development are, as it’s now the standard in product management.
The speaker from one of our events transitioned from project management to product and had to learn how to use the agile process. Here are the key points from his presentation on what agile development is.
Nick Lesec has been a full-time Product Manager for almost 4 years, starting with mobile websites in the e-commerce space and now in the enterprise social space. As a nerd for process, he has also had the opportunity to spearhead full-scale process transformations at multiple organizations and boosted his career because of it. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Letters and Science.
In a recent event, Nick spoke about how a critical part of any Product Manager’s job is execution. He discussed what agile development is, how to use it and why it is useful. He also talked about the agile and SCRUM processes for building software so the teams can realize their product vision quicker.
The agile process gets to the core of how teams work.
Agile development is useful for any Product Manager job; you need to know what it is. It’s a popular process, a good way to stand out and it’ll help Product Managers get sh*t done.
Agile means a collection of principles that are guiding the way towards how to build something.
Agile is described as adaptable, rapid, collaborative, team-oriented and quality-focused.
Adapt means: satisfy the customer, welcome challenges and optimize the process. If you’re not improving you’re not doing agile right.
Rapid means: deliver often and simplicity.
Collaborative means: business/dev collaboration and face to face conversation.
Team means: support and trust the team, zero overload and self-organizing teams.
Quality means: progress, technical excellence and good design.
While agile is the set of principles, SCRUM is the framework.
The word SCRUM comes from rugby; the whole team moving together to one direction.
SCRUM teams usually consists of 5-9 people. If it was bigger the collaboration would start to suffer.
In a SCRUM team the product owner owns the value of the product, the team members own the quality of the product and the SCRUM master owns the efficiency of the product.
Essentially, agile means to move and do things quickly and easily. The purpose behind it is to perform tasks in short phases, do reassessments frequently and adapt to new plans fast and often. Using agile makes teams more productive.