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“Agile Software Development Techniques and its Impact on Product Management”

Just in case you’re thinking of going, I’ll be at the Austin Technology Council session tomorrow (Jan. 12, 2006) on Agile Software Development Techniques and its Impact on Product Management. Unfortunately, the talk isn’t free, but they do have three speakers lined up and it’s a topic I’m particularly interested in.

IMO, traditional Product Management processes are still lean toward the waterfall-era of process design, even though Agile processes fit the goals of Product Management better (given the focus on understanding the problem space and evolving the product based on experience with it.) However, applying Agile development to large, corporate software projects can be a challenge at the managerial level. The problem is explained very well in this wikipedia quote:

“Agile processes seem to be more efficient than older methodologies, using less programmer time to produce more functional, higher quality software, but have the drawback from a business perspective that they do not provide long-term planning capability. In essence, they say that they will provide the most bang for the buck, but won’t say exactly what the bang will be.”

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_development_process January 11, 2006)

In a smaller company, the focus might be just on making rent — and when that’s the case, delivering a “bang” is all you need (and in many cases, it’s irrelevant whether the bang turns out being what you thought you’d be doing.) If the product makes money, you go with it. But when you have an identified customer with an identified problem that needs to be solved within an identified set of constraints, the folks with the checkbooks tend to want reassurance that you’ll be building the exact solution they need. It’s when constraints like these exist that formal Product Management is more often utilized, so I’m looking forward to seeing whether the presenters are able to address this issue.