Agile is taking off in the marketplace, and agile processes are the norm for helping IT departments deliver great software… but what about the business? What about the product manager? What about the software itself? What can we do to ensure that we build the RIGHT software with the RIGHT features… the features that will make us the MONEY!
This session will introduce the concepts of Business Value Metrics and Customer-Based Design a simple formula to help Business Stakeholders evaluate their application feature by feature to ensure they are building the MONEY (honey.)

Successful software products deliver a set of features your customers’ value and will pay for. To determine the correct priority and presentation of features, it’s important to understand the different behaviors and attitudes that exist in the audience for your product. Ethnographic field research is very valuable, yet can be expensive, time consuming and require skilled researchers. In this hands-on workshop, you will learn how to use collaborative play with customers to discover how they think and what they value, and use this intelligence effectively with your agile teams.

When charting new territory–-enterprise-scale Agile–-traditional roadmaps only take you so far. When landscapes change in weeks, product management must find a way to reconcile sprint plans and backlogs from multiple teams with longer-term product direction. David Wilby, SVP of Products at Borland, shares how his teams tackled the roadmap challenge during Borland’s Agile transformation. He’ll cover how roadmaps became a barrier to scaling Agile, how his teams adopted Agile roadmapping, the challenges, and the impact the new practices have had on Borland’s Agile transformation.

As more development teams adopt agile, product managers must change the way they work to keep up with faster development cycles and shorter customer feedback loops. Product managers new to agile soon realize that agile processes require more involvement from their group. Given that most product managers are already overworked, how can they manage these new activities to derive more value from software projects and products? I will share my experience transitioning to Agile, pitfalls to avoid and propose solutions to the new challenges that arise.

Effective management of a software portfolio is a challenge that many companies ignore, avoid or fail to follow through because it is too hard. Many approaches to portfolio management get so complex that decisions fail to get made. In this hands-on tutorial we explore “barely sufficient” portfolio management and introduce a simulation game where participants make decisions about which investments a company makes. Participants will learn about product, project, and portfolio management issues tying decisions to strategy and purpose in order to optimize overall return.

Traditional product managers have broad inbound and outbound responsibilities including segmentation, requirements, positioning and pricing - often shortchanging their teams. Product owners are always available and own backlogs/stories - but often lack real market experience. Both roles have challenges. PO/PM discussions are short on context and clarity. How can agile address the broader product mgmt challenge? How to agilize waterfall PMs? Do technical POs need marketing/sales/pricing skills? We’ll look at roles and organizational models that work for commercial software companies.

For almost a decade our community has claimed that agile is a risk-driven approach. Yet there is very little published material on agile risk management. Traditional risk management is based on avoidance of external variations. While, traditional project scheduling treats tasks homogeneously from a risk perspective. Lean pull systems and Real Options Theory provide new means to manage overall business risk in technology projects. This tutorial describes 3 techniques that evolved in the kanban community that increase sophistication of risk management and provide improved business agility.

This talk will look at the product owner role on an Agile team from a Pragmatic product management perspective. Many software development companies rely on their product management organizations to represent the needs of customers and the market. Concentration on problems, the people who have them, and the circumstances under which they experience those problems is what makes the marriage of Pragmatic product management and Agile so valuable. This presentation will describe how the Pragmatic approach to the MRD gives the Agile product owner a headstart and the entire Agile team an edge.