Andre Kaminski quotes Barbara Nelson’s The Politics of Agile, “When product managers weren’t looking, the developers went agile.” in a new post up at Pragmatic Marketing called “The Mythical Product Owner“. Its great to see these two worlds combine. The sum of the parts is a much greater help to companies wrestling with not only how to build products but what to build and for who.
Fitting tactical level thinking (where agile excels) into a compatible strategic framework is a powerful combination. I’m not sure of the distinction between the Product Manager Role and the traditional Product Owner as drawn. It appears that the Product Manager is defined to be more strategic and have more market orientation. I’m not sure I buy the separation in my world where companies are small and people are stretched thin but I can see it in larger orgs. I wonder abotu it because the Prouct Owner stops being the “owner” of anything and really just a middle manager of sorts with dubious authority. In my experience the way for developers to have confidence in a backlog is to have them build it or have market data. Not sure I’d want that Product Owner job.
