This week’s Sunday Rewind is a post from eight years ago in which Ramon Guiu, then Director of Product Management at Xyleme, recounts how his company made the move from the Waterfall methodology to Agile product development.
He starts by saying that the company’s product management function evolved through three different configurations during this transition and that the company size increased fourfold in the same time. He relates the the pros and cons of each configuration and its impact in the product development process.
1. Super product manager
Ramon was the company’s first product manager. Initially his role involved: talking to customers, managing the roadmap, writing specifications, supporting engineering during,working with marketing, supporting the sales cycle. It was a broad and challenging job. With the move to Agile he found he had even more things to manage than before and concludes that “this configuration works fine for startups or small teams. however, at our scale, it soon became clear it was too much for a single person to do”.
2. The odd couple: Product manager and product owner
The company took advice from experts on agile practice and, following the Scaled Agile Framework Extension (SAFe), introduced product manager and product owner roles. Responsibilities were divided as follows:
| Product manager | Product owner |
| Market / customer facing | Product team facing |
| Owns vision, roadmap, go-to-market | Owns release plans, product quality |
| Provides prioritised high level feature backlog to the product owner | Provides prioritised user story backlog to the product team |
| Defines feature acceptance criteria | Defines user story acceptance tests |
This allowed the product manager to spend most of their time in the market, defining the product and market strategy, leaving the product owner with the more tactical work. But it also led to conflicts in priorities, and lack of team alignment with the product strategy. Ramon concludes that this set-up led to too many conflicts so they moved to another configuration.
3. The dynamic duo: Product manager and product marketing manager
They decided to introduce a product marketing manager role:
| Product manager | Product marketing manager |
| Brings market knowledge to the product | Brings the product to the market |
| Owns product strategy | Owns go-to-market strategy |
| Defines requirements | Develops sales tools |
| Manages backlog priorities and the release plan | Manages the product launch plan |
They found that alignment between the two roles became much easier. Ramon thinks this is because “alignment only needs to be reached at the vision and roadmap level, which doesn’t require as much frequent communication as the more tactical daily work inside the development team”. He concludes: “As an added benefit, this configuration has proven well-suited to supporting our move to a Design Thinking approach to finding problems and discovering the best solutions.”
Read the original post: From waterfall to agile: A product manager transition
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