Product Management Posts
Rick Segal point’s to his son-in-laws post about product management here. It’s well worth a read. Adam’s blog led me to the Productologist which in turn lead to me to the CrankyPM. All good stuff but I can’t help feeling that most of the PM gurus are cut out for old school software development with long release cycles and would balk at the real meaning in the Agile Manifesto.
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
Footnote: After an hour of feeling guilty for not completing some user personas for corporate information security dept’s (subject of a future post and a timely reminder from a reader of this blog responding to my call for feedback, thanks) I saw that a mere comment I added to Digg about a Security Bullshit cartoon generated 350 hits in the last few hours; which combined with traffic from SecurityMetrics made it the second fastest growing blog at WordPress (800,000 blogs, see screen capture on the right). This prompted me to go back and triple check that the social networking plans in the SourceClear platform are solid. They are. It won’t be trendy like Digg but the same principles of people trusting their peers and groups of respected individuals is very powerful and will be in there. After the dust of Web 2.0 settles I really do think we will have learnt a lot about how to design and build web sites a lot better.
April 4, 2007 at 1:48 am
Mark, I have to disagree with your statement that PM gurus (not sure that I would label myself with that moniker, but I appreciate the complement) are better suited to old-school development. It can be very easy (and comfortable) to rest on long cycles, but it really depends on what your product does and who your audience is.
I’d like my releases to be faster and more frequent, but my products are for enterprise-level customers and they frequently have to go through rigorous testing (the products, not the customers) before they can be put into production at the customer site. I could have a new release/update every two weeks, but in reality, our customers would wait until there was a significant amount of new/fixed features before they would upgrade and start the testing process on their end.
Of the principles listed on the Agile Manifesto, I like to believe that I use the following ones regularly–
+ Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
+ Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
+ Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential.
April 10, 2007 at 12:50 am
Community Software Development for Embedded Devices
Photo by Ron Fredericks using Canon EOS-10D 34mm fluorite lens, circular polarizer, 1.5s & f/22 @ ISO 100, on tripod, from ECI’s HP lab collection.
Ron Fredericks writes: I envision the day when community software engineering projects are c…
April 10, 2007 at 5:17 pm
[...] wrote a comment the other day on another blog, Security Buddha, in response to a post about how Product Managers (at least not the ones who write blogs) are not [...]
April 24, 2007 at 10:18 pm
[...] an interesting thread going on across several blogs about the Agile development method (Agile, here and across other posts, is being used as a [...]
October 18, 2007 at 5:25 pm
Mark — sorry for being so late to the party; just caught this post now.
I run all software development in agile currently, and really wouldn’t want to do it any other way. I agree with all elements of the agile manifesto; however getting people to believe in them as well (either explicitly or implicitly) is not always an easy feat.
Waterfall is, like you say, cut out for old school software development. While it may have its place, it’s not my cup of tea, that’s for sure.
Thanks for the link, and the compliments! I’m enjoying your archive / current posts…