Lou Paglia (10/08): here is a fundamental...

Agile/Scrum and Product Management (part 3)

on On Product Management from 14 weeks ago

here is a fundamental issue. many organizations do not discern the difference between product management, product development and even further product marketing. And often, this could extend even to project management. Many times this is due a start-up environment or sheer resource constraints and not so much that “they don’t get the difference between the role definitions”. This has a cascading effect into one individual’s role in agile and SCRUM. Sometime due to this constraint the same person is the person doing the OUTWARD product role as well as the INWARD product development role. That is reality and is something that I feel many readers here cannot ignore.

There is a way to strike a balance. And the points here are valid, however that if you need to be on a plan seeing customers, you can’t be in the daily SCRUM. My sense (and we are early in the agile adoption process) is that just puts more pressure on the SCRUM master to track down the open items and ensure the sprint keeps moving.