Agile Thinking
Agile development processes have had a pretty big impact on product management. An agile product manager has to be adept at bringing clear customer requirements into an iterative development context. This can be a terrific opportunity for product management and engineering to innovate during the development process. But I've found that this kind of agile approach can be applied to a more traditional development process, too. In an agile world, a product manager (often serving as product owner, as well) is responsible for delivering customer requirements in the form of use cases as the team goes through a series of rapid development cycles. The product design may change after (or even during) each of the sprints, so the PM is responsible for restating the customer requirements in the new context, as well as creating new use case examples. All the while, the PM must keep the product vision and goals at the forefront. In a traditional "waterfall" development process, the...