The Productologist

This is a new feature that I am trying out. On a regular basis, I’ll write a post with a collection of interesting (at least to me) postings from other Product Management blogs. It’s intended to give my readers some exposure to what else is going on in the world of Product Management and to spur some dialog.

Just because I include a link to a particular posting, that is not an indication that I agree with the original author. In fact, I may post topics that are the opposite of my views or at least somewhat controversial in order to provide a contrasting viewpoint to the one I present on The Productologist.

There’s an interesting thread going on across several blogs about the Agile development method (Agile, here and across other posts, is being used as a catch-all for many rapid release methodologies) and the role of Product Management. I have posted an article and made comments on several of these blogs, but this post isn’t about that. It’s about the relationship between Product Management and Engineering.

The Cranky Product Manager, in her post about Agile, and a response from one of the other bloggers involved in the discussion demonstrates the tension between Product Managers and Engineering groups.

I wrote a comment the other day on another blog, Security Buddha, in response to a post about how Product Managers (at least not the ones who write blogs) are not really geared for rapid product release cycles. The author had reviewed several Product Management blogs, including this one, and came to this conclusion–

“I can’t help feeling that most of the PM gurus are cut out for old school software development with long release cycles and would balk at the real meaning in the Agile Manifesto.”

My comments on Security Buddha went something like this (paraphrased, but you can see the original here):