Whenever two methodologies gain steam you will find there is conflict. Since 2008 Pragmatic Marketing the grandfather of Product Management certification and training has been messaging the differences and the conflicts in interest between Development-focused Agile and Market-focused Product Management. Sometimes it builds to almost hatred, like the Hatfields and McCoys. However, they do not have to be oil and water. Let me explain how we can add a little soap to make them work well together.
Agile Scrum or other DevOps methods all work to get the minimum possible amount of development work out to produce some clear business value. The team is guided by a Product Owner who must be available at any time to answer for the business and customer. This Product Owner is often thought to be the same as a Product Manager. This would be true if a Hatfield was dating a McCoy, which rarely happened.
To illustrate the challenge in working with both methodologies and getting maximum value is shown in Figure 1. Note the much larger world that Product Management is aware of with two of the domains completely outside the realm of an Agile Development Team who only look to the Product Owner for direction. The biggest mistake seen is that the Product Owner Wandering from the roadmap. Development teams (and their product owners) concentrate on the next release, but often lose sight of the roadmap (budgeted year and communicated years 2 and 3 plans) that achieve business results. Product Management is meant to define the roadmap and paint the picture of what will be done by when to create large business value and differentiate your solution from competition or to retain customers.
Figure 1 Difference Between a Product Manager and a Product Owner
To get off to a happy marriage of McCoy to Hatfield we must be able to show a product roadmap in ServiceNow. We have done this with ServiceNow Visual Task Boards. For a real product that will provide IT Project Managed Services leveraging Demand, Project and Cost applications in ServiceNow we took very story and mapped it to a Theme and Epic. As shown in Figure 2 you can now tell the Product Roadmap vision to any party; a Customer, a Focus Group, the funding stakeholder or someone with a new requirement. Every new requirement should map into an existing Initiative and be attached to an existing capability or a new capability or initiative created. Product Managers will define the roadmap. Product Owners must execute at a more granular level. Product Managers have the ability to map the backlog of requirements based on technical effort and pull in those that can be done for little or no cost into a roadmap aligned requirements sprint set of stories. This typically will allow the Agile team to deliver 25% more requirements for the same effort define in sprint planning.
Figure 2 Product Management Roadmap in ServiceNow
In conclusion, learn both methodologies Agile Scrum and Product Management to keep an ear toward customers and to deliver on the time-is-money premise that if you can get the smallest piece of useful work into production you will make your customer happy, you will get early feedback and you will make adjustments based on real use all at the lowest cost to design, build and deploy.
NOTE: MY POSTINGS REFLECT MY OWN VIEWS AND DO NOT NECESSARILY REPRESENT THE VIEWS OF MY EMPLOYER, ACCENTURE.
