Top Ten Signs That Your Product Manager Isn’t Agile
Here at Enthiosys we spend a lot of time helping Product Managers become Agile. In the process, we often run into developers who are really frustrated with their Product Managers’ lack of Agility. Acknowledging their pain, and with special thanks to our partners at Pragmatic Marketing for their contributions to this list, here are our top ten ways to tell if you’re Product Manager doesn’t understand Agile. And yeah, it was hard to whittle this down from the 40+ on our initial list.
10. She says “I think” instead of “the research says” or “during our last review meeting with a customer…”.
9. He thinks release planning can be done in 2 hours.
8. She sometimes attends an iteration planning meeting, and rarely (or never) attends an iteration acceptance meeting.
7. He thinks the backlog is just the list of market problems he captured in his MRD.
6. She doesn’t have a roadmap beyond the stories in the next release.
5. He thinks MuSCoW works when prioritizing the backlog*.
4. She can’t provide acceptance criteria during release or iteration planning.
3. He stops visiting customers so he can attend every daily stand-up. Even worse, he talks about his tasks during the daily stand-up.
2. She thinks that year-old market data is good enough for managing the backlog or developing a roadmap.
1. He thinks a product owner is a Product Manager.
*MuSCoW is a way to organize requirements into buckets of “Must, Should, Could, Would”.
