Best Practices for Agile Product Management
Product teams are the ones responsible for delivering outstanding customer experiences.
“Agile product management” means working in a highly responsive way so you can deliver products and updates to market quickly. But if you implement agile product management blindly, it can mean that your teams rush to market with products that are either new or that they believe are improved — without fully considering if they are delivering against their own vision or what customers want.
This methodology can inspire teams to move faster. But at the end of a development phase, teams might also look back and wonder if what was built was truly the right solution. Product managers can set goals, building and sharing a clear product roadmap.
Here are five best practices that agile product teams can follow:
Start with strategy.
One of the best ways to move quickly while delivering value is to ground your work in a firm strategy — one that includes your product’s vision and goals. The vision is the core of your product or what you want it to achieve in the future. Your goals are more time-bound and define what you want to achieve in the next quarter or year to build toward that vision.
Capture customer ideas.
Customer feedback often drives innovation. But managing ideas goes beyond just capturing feedback. It also requires storing, sorting, and determining the next great idea to include in your roadmap — the one that will bring joy to your customers and value to your business.
Capture new ideas through user interviews or internal channels such as support or sales but, be careful not to iterate with every piece of feedback that comes your way.
Define the big work.
You may need broad categories for the work that will help you achieve your goals. These are your initiatives, which are also called epics and themes. Examples might include efforts like “enhance the mobile experience” or “speed up performance.” These categories can host your more tactical efforts — the individual features and user stories.
Practice strategic prioritization.
If your team cannot agree on how to prioritize competing features, then your development speed could grind to a halt. Let strategy be your guide for what you need to prioritize on your roadmap. Plan out your features in relation to your initiatives (which are tied to your goals)
Work across teams.
Building great products quickly requires coordination with multiple teams, including development, marketing, sales, support and design. Development will be one of the most critical teams that product managers collaborate with because developers can provide realistic estimates on how long the work will take. But every team matters. You need to be in frequent contact with everyone who impacts the product and the customer experience
Resources & further reading