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