What is Agile Product Management?

Agile Product Management is an ideology of setting up Product strategy and create road maps for the product in an Agile environment. It would encourage an adaptive approach to Product planning and implementation through which organizations would respond quickly to the feedback and build the products that customers want.

The core Agile Product Management would be responsible for a widely spread use of Agile software development methodologies like Kanban or scrum. These methods would highlight early delivery, evolutionary development, and continuous improvement.

Benefits of Agile Product Management

Agile redefines the way a Product Manager thinks about how to plan and build the products. Traditionally, the customers experiences were built in a sequential manner due to which changes could not be implemented. This led to the failure of huge software development projects which very much needed a fluid approach. The teams seek customer feedback and other learnings.

Agile provides a flexible approach for software planning and development. As the products are built in short increments, the product managers will be able to adjust the plan on the go. Let us see some of the key benefits of Agile Product management -

• Continuous Learning from the customers throughout the product Lifecycle.
• Adjusting the near-term roadmap to meet the customer's needs continuously.
• Delivering the value to the customers in an incremental way.
• Quick response to the new and changing requirements.
• Collaborate with engineering to deliver the work quickly.

Agile Product Management Practices

Product Manager would need flexibility in Agile environment. As the product manager spends less time in defining the product upfront, product manager must continuously adapt the product roadmap and reprioritize what to build depending on the customer feedback.

Let us now see the overview of Product Management responsibilities that are carried out in an Agile environment.

• Set Product Strategy - Setting up a clear strategy is so important in an Agile environment. Product Managers would be responsible in defining the product's long-term direction and vision. This would need to work closely with the customers to understand their paint points, setting strategic product goals, initiatives and researching the market which would align with the overall business objectives.
• Understand the customer needs - Agile methodologies would focus on delivering value to customers quickly which would mean that the product managers must stay close to the customers in order to understand what exactly they need. Gathering the feedback early and often would ensure that the product would deliver the expected benefits to the users.
• Prioritize features - In Agile Product Management, continuously prioritizing the features for implementation would be on top priority. This would involve Defining user stories, maintaining the product backlog, and deciding what to build and when. Product managers would work closely with the engineers to define requirements, estimate features, and collaborate on release plan based on the team's capacity.
• Release Customer experiences - Agile teams would try so hard to deliver new customer experiences frequently. The tempo may vary from quarterly to monthly, weekly, or even daily. Irrespective of the frequency, product managers would be responsible for delivering the complete product experience to the customers. This would involve working closely with IT, sales, Marketing, Engineering, and support to make sure organizational readiness.
• Measure the product success - Product success in Agile would be measured by how the customers interact with services and products and how it impacts the growth, customer's acquisition, customer churn, conversion rates and frequency of feature updates.