Agile Product Management Masterclass

The course is designed to leave delegates with greater confidence in the following five areas:

1. What agile product management is and what to expect from those who are experts in it.
2. Improving your product delivery capability, dealing with politics, geography and organisational impediments
3. Identifying who your real stakeholders are and learning how to influence and negotiate with them.
4. Gaining insights to support decisions, understanding how to use your data effectively.
5. Optimising the delivery of real value with expert tools and techniques.

Course Content

Agile product management

We take the role of agile product management apart, sift out the buzzwords and jargon, and put it back together again to form a clear picture about what it takes to lead agile products. Being effective in this role requires some specific skills and doesn’t always make you popular. We introduce case studies of high-impact product leaders who managed to cut through the politics and get things delivered.

Improving your product delivery capability

All products exist within an organisation, and whether you’re a start-up or an enterprise you need to understand and improve the system within which you work. We’ll challenge you to assess and improve your ability to:

• Set strategic objectives, prioritise work and change scope.
• Control the composition, size and productivity of your development team.
• Manage your budget and how it is allocated.
• Get the most out of procurement of equipment and services.

Delegates will identify their own constraints, and focus on what positive impact they can have on their ability to deliver value.

Identifying who your real stakeholders are

One constraint influencing your product delivery capability is the choice arising from a diverse set of stakeholders. Requiring consensus across the board would bring progress to a halt, but equally constraining the decision-making to the experience of just yourself would limit innovation. A key part of leading product delivery is striking the right balance and establishing mutually beneficial relationships with the following interested parties:

• Product sponsors, PMO and Finance.
• Managers of dependent systems.
• Marketing.
• The development team.
• Internal users.
• Customers.
• Technical authorities such as architecture, operations and security.

All of these parties can be a potential source of great help or great hindrance. We’ll review existing stakeholder relationships and identify opportunities to get more value while reducing problems.

Gaining insights to support decisions

Insights based on a focused set of relevant data adds rigour to your decision-making. There are limitless options for measurement and analysis in product development. We’ll look at a broad range of options open to product management, including:

• Team capacity and velocity.
• Value, risk, cost of delay.
• Customer satisfaction.
• Active user-base.
• Feature usage index.
• Release lead time, frequency, cost.
• Sales, revenue, margin.
• Defect rate.
• Installed version index.
• Customer absorption rate.

Delegates will then identify which of these metrics are the most significant indicators for their strategic objectives. This will lead into making a plan for getting good quality measurement feeding into effective review and decision-making.

Optimising the delivery of real value

Understanding the value proposition for your product completes the cycle of agile product management. There are many different types of product, which will put emphasis on different outcomes. The closing exercise allows product managers to create a detailed picture of the value they are offering, in a way that is relevant to:

• Customer-facing products such as websites or mobile apps.
• Staff-facing products such as internal intranets or content management systems.
• Technical infrastructure such as authentication engines or search APIs.

This exercise touches on all of the previous topics and leaves closes by challenging delegates to define exactly what they will do next.