How I plan ● Product management and Agile
Product Management
I have been a product manager both formally and informally at various points my career.
Apple Mac OS product manager for printing, type, and graphics (08/1992 - 08/1995): In my role as a Senior Graphic Designer in Apple’s Creative Services group (08/1986 - 08/1992), I was alpha- and beta-testing revolutionary products such as Adobe Illustrator and Quark Xpress (a page layout application) as well as Apple’s own system-level graphs support technology. I was offered the position of Mac OS product manager for printing, type, and graphics because I was a target user who understood the needs of the graphic design market in detail.
In this role I learned how to be an Apple product manager—which meant learning how set aggressive product goals, negotiate with developers, and then ship great products. I have been a product manager at other companies in my career, sometimes in the absence of a formally-hired product manager. For example, in addition to my role as services and product designer I was acting product manager at Parsable, ACME, and HAN:DLE.
Agile
I was formally trained in Agile when I was at Avaya. I’ve had over 15 years experience with integrating design deliverables directly into Agile development processes at every company I’ve worked at.
An Agile-based design delivery timeline looks like this:
Each line item is an Agile story. The blue bars show estimated time required to create, review, update, and then deliver a design for each story. Gray arrows pointing to the right indicate the sprint when the development team will actually begin work on a given story. The goal is to make sure each story design is delivered prior to the sprint when it would actually be needed.
Because I participate in the entire Sprint Zero story creation and prioritization effort, I can coordinate with Dev and PM leads to make sure Design delivers what’s at the start of any given sprint, if not earlier.
For example, look at story 4.7.1, “Integrated call log and voicemail” (part of “1x MOBILE PHONE”) in the schedule above. The design requirements for 4.7.1, however, weren’t needed until Iteration (i.e. “sprint”) 5. But, from a design perspective, my team needed to work on 4.7.1 in parallel with call log stories needed for Iteration 3.