 Agile product development is determined by six levels of agile planning: (1) Product vision – long-term target of the product Let us look at the responsibility split: The Product Manager is responsible for the first four levels i.e. vision, strategy, roadmap and release plan. The Product Owner is responsible for the other two levels sprint and daily plan. So far so good. A survey from the 280Group in 2015 reveals that 70 per cent of Product Managers also act as Product Owners. And here the dilemma starts: Being responsible for all six planning levels, serving the customer interface, researching markets and competition and steering product development, all at the same time, is not possible for a single human being (except for technically simple products and a low number of developers). The combined Product Manager & Owner drowns in a barrel of tasks and responsibilities, thus creating a tight bottleneck which erodes all efficiency gains of the agile development. If you give full responsibility for the two roles to a single person then some topics will be neglected. As a rule this will happen to the top four planning levels: Product vision – does not exist No surprise then, that the product looks more like a patchwork rather than a homogenous and well-engineered solution. Teams react rather than act. Tactics dominates strategy. Solving problems is in the foreground rather than customer value. Here is my recommendation: Do you agree or do you have another opinion on it? I look forward to your feedback - ressenig@realskills.de |
