PITA 046

Written By randy silver

Topic 1: How might you help product people plan long-term without sending them on a SAFe course? 

  • Lack of confidence that anything in LATER (Now/Next/Later) will ever happen - and lack of confidence that anything in Now & Next will happen in a reasonable time

  • Team lacks maturity in terms of planning

  • We put programme milestones on top of a Now/Next/Later roadmap to show our commitments

  • SAFe is not fit for purpose - it’s Waterfall in Agile’s clothing. And it’s been a disaster where we are

  • What do you actually mean by planning? And how honest do you want to be about it?

  • We had to take the stakeholder on a journey - so did a case study with them to get them there


Topic 2: When is a product initiative really an IT system change project, and does the difference matter? 

  • Break it into pieces - they can be incremental and agile

  • Try Wardley Mapping  - where are you reliant on user behaviour? Those need to be more agile/are more uncertain. 

  • Differentiate between Lean and agile

  • If there isn’t a value story for PMs to realise over and above tech being de-risked - they may be getting in the way

  • Agile isn’t for everything - some things are infrastructure and thrive as waterfall, with some derisking of assumptions


Topic 3: I'm interviewing with a company that has both POs and TPMs dedicated roles. Looks overly complex IMHO. Curious if folks saw this type of org before and how exactly do they collaborate with PMs 

  • Every org does this differently (POs and PMs) - we do it to try and stop PMs from burning out too quickly

  • This is “Product Owner = Backlog Administrator” - like the BBC use BAs. To fill in the detail for the devs because PMs are spread too thin.

  • Lots of orgs turn BAs into POs, because ‘agile is cool’

  • BAs get ahead by creating certainty. PMs by pointing out doubt.

  • Lazily PO (as a role) tends to own backlog, PM (as a job) owns roadmap. Just usually PM jobs expect both covered.

  • Depending on the size of the org - or the age of it! - this isn’t necessarily a worry. But in a smaller or newer company, it seems way too complicated.

randy silver
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