Part #5 How to adopt Agile Product Marketing

The Agile Product Manager works closely with the engineering and technical teams working with in an agile framework such as scrum. The adoption of an agile methodology means that new features will get delivered incrementally every 30, 20 or even 10 days. This is great news for the product owner who sees the product developed and released incrementally (with in a matter of weeks as opposed to months) and gives them the ability to change priority and the features depending on the demands of the market-place. However this can prove a bit of a challenge for the Product Marketing Manager who works closly with the Product Manager and is tasked with communicating product features to the outside world. How do you best communicate product information to outside audiences in an agile way ? Ensuring that you are getting the best kudos for the efforts you put in. Here are seven tips for the Product Marketing Manager who find themselves responsible for marketing products that are developed incrementally in an agile frame work.

1. Review the product backlog and create high-level marketing material based on each product backlog items.
2. Contribute to the product backlog.
3. Meet with the product owner and discuss the priorities for the next sprint.
4. Attend the daily 10 minute stand-up sprints meeting (especially the ones toward the end of a sprint) so that you get periodic updates on what is going on.
5. Attend sprint review meetings so that you get a demo of the newly developed features.
6. Review product roadmap with product owners and scrum master and discuss which sprints (and dates of the sprints) will cover which high-level features that have been sketch out on the road map.
7. When publishing hard-copy material ensure product features are explained at a 'high level' and publish the 'detail' on-line.

The Product Marketing Manager like the Product Manager is duty bound to adopt an agile approach to work in-order to secure the competitive edge for both the product they are marketing and for their own career aspirations.

Read also Agile People Working in a Non-agile world
and Implementing an Agile sales framework

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How Product Managers can successfully ride the storms of a commercial life.

Technology companies often go through good and bad times and even through the good times there will be situations which seek to hinder the personnel performance of Product Managers and Technologists. On occasions there will be situations and decisions that run against the grain of your feelings and the path you’ve laid out for yourself. Company issues: recruitment- either you can not hire the right staff, sudden change in direction that takes you unaware, technical environments not functioning and therefore hindering progress. Loss of an expected sale or even a sale man landing an unexpected deal that pushes a lot of last minute work your way with tight deadlines. And list goes on.

Here are seven tips to help product managers ride the companies storms: Have a roadmap for your self as well as your product and make sure your roadmap is flexible enough to incorporate changes and therefore capitalise opportunities should they arise.

#1. Develop the ability to hold two opposing views in your mind at one time and yet be able to come up with a third and even better view.

#2. Ensure you have a mentor and know when to ask for help.

#3. Be your own worst critic.

#4. Make sure you are constantly learning from your past experiences and the experiences of others.

#5. Keep your feet on the ground

#6. Be constantly learning and reading – this will help you act and re-act in unfamiliar situations occur.
#7. Make sure you have some fun activities outside of your commercial life.

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Part #4 Agile Customer Support

I worked for a company where in the morning I was booked on a flight to troubleshot issues at a customers site in Switzerland at Midday it had changed to Germany and by the time I went home I was booked on a flight (for the next day) to Florida. That’s agile customer care for you. The ethos of the company was to adapt your schedules to meet the customers' need. Indeed the competitive edge that we had was the fact the we responded to the customers needs and had a well trained customer support department which was backed up by a test dept, R&D, project managers, product managers, technical sales and even the technical manager and technical director who all had the ability to visit customer sites with the view of fixing problems. The agility of all technical staff meant that the company had a great reputation for customer service and therefore won repeat business and experienced greater ROI year on year, that's got to make good business sense!

I believe that our success was down to two very simple attributes that each member of staff had adopted:
1. We worked hard to be better than the competition.
2. Everybody was customer focussed.
This meant there was very little time for internal company politics and the petty little immature things that causes a company to loose its way.

Success depends on how agile your customer support is – is it down to a few individuals with the job title of 'customer support engineer' or is it the whole company.

See also: Part#1 Implementing an Agile Frame Work

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Part #3 How to run an agile training course

We’ve all attended training session which were death by power point. There was little interaction from the attendees and the trainer seemed determined to get through everyone of his/her dozen or so bullet points that appeared on the numerous amount of slides that they had.

I attended a six day 1st line management training course sometime ago – and was dreading the thought of having to sit through a zillion power point slides and hearing the droning of some poor trainers voice for a the rest of the week. However I was presently surprised. The agility of the trainer was quite refreshing and the participation from the attendees was second to none. Here’s how he approached the session.

1. The introductions: who you are what you hope to gain from the course – all jotted down on a flip chart.
2. Quick survey of participants to see if there were any “challenging issues” they were currently facing that they need to resolve.
3. Merge the participants’ expectation with the course content (the two were pretty close). This could be considered the backlog items
4. Short problem solving exercise to get us to think out of the box and wet our appetites.
   Run a series of exercises and tasks.
5. Open discussion / feedback on the tasks
6. Periodically visit the “challenging issues” previously raised and discuss in conjunction with the feedback from exercises and tasks that were set.
7. At the end of the day review the backlog items and tick off the backlog items that had been covered.
8. Ask attendees if they need any more input on a given backlog task.
9. Review the course at the end of the six days referring to the backlog items that have been covered.

No power point slides, very little use of projector or plasma screen. Lots of writing on flipcharts, constant inspecting and adapting through out the day to ensure participants needs were met. A real agile approach to a training course.
Benefits:

• Managers and leaders are better trained based on emerging needs as opposed to a rigid inflexible curriculum.


• Teams stand a better chance of improving their performance because real life issues are being addressed.

Next time you attend a training course that is "death by power point" and you get a feedback form asking... "how it was for you" - point the training to this article and suggest they adopt training the agile way.

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