Tag Archives: Pragmatic Marketing

Product Owner is the Most Stressful Role in Scrum

Among other points brought up by Barbara Nelson at the OC APLN meeting last week, she contends that Product Owner is the most stressful role in Scrum, and I don’t doubt that.  I’m sure it’s especially true in organizations that haven’t yet wizened up to the fact that product marketing takes a triad of full-time roles (a Product Strategist, a Technical Product Manager, and a Product Marketing Manager aka. Go-To-Market Manager).  Not only do some organizations try to cram all three roles into a single position, but they often pile on the tasks of a Sales Engineer to boot.

Then, comes along Scrum (or some other form of Agile) and the whole Technical Product Manager role gets turned upside down to become what Scrum calls a Product Owner. About the only good news here is that Mike Cohn shows in his book, Succeeding with Agile, that the time required of a Product Owner while an organization is adopting Agile is not too intense right at the start.  New Scrum development teams place much higher demands on the ScrumMaster than the Product Owner at first, before the ratio flip-flops.  So, there’s a little leeway for the product management organization to figure out how to accommodate Scrum in their day-to-day activities while the development teams are still getting up to speed on Scrum.  That leeway is a small gift that shouldn’t be squandered.

For more about the triad of product marketing roles, be sure to grab Pragmatic Marketing’s free e-book, The Strategic Role of Product Management.

Week in Recap

The second week of the month is always busy for me.   On Wednesday, I reconnected with Barbara Nelson of Pragmatic Marketing when she spoke at the Orange County APLN meeting in Irvine. It was the first time I’d seen her since she taught my Pragmatic Marketing class years ago. (We were both at the 1-day project managers conference at UC Irvine in February, but failed to connect.)

It was another great APLN meeting. For one thing, I snagged a laminated copy of the new-and-improved Pragmatic Marketing Framework chart, the one that shows the 37 different areas of responsibility of product marketing management. This chart served as the base layer for most of the slides that Nelson presented, as she talked about different roles within product marketing and the impact of Agile on those roles.  (More on that in a future post.)

The next night, I attended the Orange County Java User Group meeting where Josh Long stood in for Rod Barlow and gave a thorough review of the state of concurrency in the Java world and how they take advantage of it at Shopzilla.  I picked up more than a few pointers.  The OCJUG presentation calendar page has a link to the complete slideshow.

Next week, I’m participating in the kickoff for a new Scrum adoption project, so there will be plenty of things going on shortly to inspire new posts.  In the mean time, I’m also looking forward to the Orange County GTD Meetup next weekend.

Is the User an Expert or a Novice? It Depends

Pragmatic Marketing LogoI posted earlier that Barbara Nelson of Pragmatic Marketing will be one of the presenters at ProductCamp this Saturday. When a company I was working with six years ago hired Pragmatic Marketing to teach everyone their system, it was a definite game changer, and she was the one who taught the course.  For my part, as a software engineer, I learned from her how to work much more closely and effectively with the marketeers.  The insights we all gained from Pragmatic Marketing’s experience were invaluable.  They are lessons that I continue to apply every day.

As just one tiny example, I’m reminded of an Aha! moment I experienced back then. It was the notion that novices don’t typically stay novices for very long. Continue reading Is the User an Expert or a Novice? It Depends

ProductCamp at UC Irvine Sat 2/27/2010

ProductCampLogo

Product Managers and Project Managers will be gathering for an “unconference” at U.C. Irvine next Saturday.  It’s free to sign up for anyone who’s interested.  Go to http://www.productcampsocal.org to sign up to attend and also to vote on the sessions you’d like to see.

One of the proposed sessions is being led by Barbara Nelson of Pragmatic Marketing.  She’s was my instructor when I took the Pragmatic Marketing course six years ago, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing her again.  If her participation is any indication of the general caliber of this event, then we all stand to gain greatly.  See you there.