Helping Product Managers Triumph in Agile: What to Do When Sales Wants to Change Your Roadmap; Spring 2018 Events

Happy 2018! It’s been a few months but I’m back with some big news for 2018, including a (long-overdue) site redesign that, among other things, should look much better on mobile devices. I’m still tweaking some things, so bear with me. In the meantime, I’ve been busy blogging…

Helping Product Managers Triumph in an Agile World: The SiriusDecisions Agile Engine for Product Management
Many product management leaders in organizations that use agile as a product development process express that they’re challenged to get their people to not just act as product owners in an agile/scrum sense, but as product managers who are responsible for the overall commercial success of the product. On an almost daily basis, I’m talking to product management leaders who find that agile is causing their product managers to focus too much on short-term tactical activities that are isolated from the broader product strategy and lifecycle. This isn’t a failure of agile but it is due to the lack of a structured way of getting product managers to connect what’s happening at the sprint level to releases and product strategy. In this post on the SiriusDecisions blog — Helping Product Managers Triumph in an Agile World: The SiriusDecisions Agile Engine for Product Management — I explain more about how product teams can overcome these challenges and unveil our new framework that describes how product management’s strategic and lifecycle management responsibilities need to adapt and mesh with an agile product development approach.

Help! Sales Is Trying to Change My Product Roadmap!
Another topic that we’re hearing about regularly in our work with b-to-b product teams is the challenges of making progress on a strategic roadmap when salespeople are always “requesting” features or capabilities that threaten to derail your roadmap. In my post on the SiriusDecisions blog Help! Sales Is Trying to Change My Product Roadmap!, I offer some advice on how to shift your thinking (hint: It’s not your roadmap) and offer four specific tips to improve your innovation and product management processes to better leverage customer and sales feedback.

Upcoming Events
Spring is always a big season for events, and this is shaping up to be another busy one. There are a number of things on my calendar, but here’s a select few where you will be able to find me in person:

What’s Hot on Twitter
Here are a few of my recent tweets that have generated the most interest recently; to get these in real-time, join the 8600+ others who follow me at @jefflash:

And I know it’s well past the Holiday season, but in case you missed it…