Certified Agile Product Management™

Do you know that Agile has been there for many years? And that big companies like Toyota have been using agile for many many years?

In this lesson, you will walk through the history and timeline of agile. You will be able to understand the development of Agile from Lean Manufacturing, XP, Toyota Production System, and other systems prior to the Agile Manifesto.

Key Learning Topics for this lesson include:

• Timeline of Agile History

• Systems prior to Agile Manifesto

All research shows that agile companies have outperformed others in adapting to COVID-19. By examining their priorities and using practices such as objectives and key results (OKRs), they have speeded up their work and adapted to new industry landscapes. The weekly and daily rhythm of agile teams has worked well in remote settings. Tools for tracking performance and health give leaders a sense of how well and quickly things are happening and where to pay more attention

Traditional Product development spends a lot of time and energy focused on processes and tools, producing comprehensive specification documents, negotiating detailed contracts, and strictly following plans. This approach makes it very difficult to adapt to changing business needs.

In this Lesson, you will be presented with the values and principles of the Agile Manifesto, understanding that they are a set of guidelines rather than strict rules to follow. Most importantly you will realize the significance of the Agile Manifesto “While we value items on the right, we value the items on the left more”.

Key Learning Topics for this lesson include:

• 4 Core Values of the Agile Manifesto

• 12 Principles of the Agile Manifesto

Agile is touted as one of the best, most important work methodologies, but how does it apply during the pandemic? In what ways is it relevant (or not?) through a crisis like the one we’re facing brought on by COVID-19?

Actually, the agile mindset and methodologies have a lot to teach us about how to work most effectively when we’re working differently. In fact, companies that embrace agile most comprehensively throughout their organizations are the most successful.

As the title suggests, your role as a product manager is to, of course, manage the product. So it follows that we must first understand what a product is. Depending on your product, your responsibilities as a product manager may vary. How can we define our product?

In this lesson, you will learn what a product is, and how the product manager is responsible for the product.

Key Learning Topics for this lesson include:

• What is a Product?

• What are the Responsibilities of the Product Managers

A product needs to be relevant: the users must have an immediate use for it. A product needs to be functionally able to do what it is supposed to and do it with good quality.

A product needs to be communicated: Users and potential users must know why they need to use it, what benefits they can derive from it, and what difference it makes to their lives. As a product manager, your job is to know your product and define your strategy to deliver a good quality product to your customer.

Product management is unique. Unlike many other professions, product managers must forge their own path. They must build roadmaps, plans, and strategies, and they must collaborate with engineers to build the actual product. So, how can product managers ensure their success?

In this lesson, we will delve into the role of the product manager, and how it can look in your organization.

Key Learning Topics for this lesson include:

• The Role of the Product Manager

Great products deliver value to their customers, have a clearly defined sense of purpose, and solve real problems. But more importantly, they help people tell a story about themselves. Throughout the product management journey, you always have the end-user in mind. Great products are designed to enable the end-user to take control of their life. If you want people to care about your product, you have to create something that they care about.

The reality for most product managers is that they have to find a way to integrate this new Agile way of working into the existing organizational structure.

In this lesson, we will have a look at some considerations you will have to make when making the shift to Agile Product Management.

Key Learning Topics for this lesson include:

• The shift from traditional to Agile product management

So, what’s to be done? In his book XLR8, John P. Kotter notes that the solution is not to trash what we know and start over. But instead to re-introduce a second operating system. We still need the traditional system that drives the current revenue model, provides efficiency and stability, keeps the heat, power, and lights on, and sells and maintains its products and services. But we need a second system that adds Agility to the forefront, and solutions that address emerging opportunities and problems. One that is nimble, adaptable, and value stream based.

Job titles, seniority, and hierarchy in product management are all a bit hazy. It makes it challenging to compare jobs, plan your career, and hire the best people. So let's discuss what we do know about the levels of product management.

In this lesson, we will go through the product management levels, giving you an overview of each.

Key Learning Topics for this lesson include:

• Different levels of Product Management

Of course, most businesses do not require all of these stages, how will this fit into your business? A single Product Manager may be assigned to a startup. A handful of Product Managers might report to a Head of Product/VP of Product as your company grows. Only when the firm and its product line expand, you will need to consider adding more levels. Like everything else in the product, these team structures and groups should be aligned with consumer demands. You may then incentivize and organize teams under your company’s objectives.

The whole structure should allow you and your teams to explore the following questions: Do your team’s titles appropriately represent their jobs? Are they clear enough, so job seekers looking at your open positions understand what you’re looking for and if the work is right for them? Having clear and consistent job titles for product management will help all better understand the professions, responsibilities, and groups.

The way we organize work is changing. Along with that we also see a shift in mindset around team structure as a technique to improve productivity. With the traditional project-centred model, companies organize their teams around tasks, with siloed groups working on one step in the project workflow, before handing it off to the next group. Recently, experts have been emphasizing the shift towards moving from a project-to-product mindset, which focuses on enabling teams to become end-to-end experts.

But what does moving from Project to Product really mean?

In this lesson, you'll discover the difference between a project vs product mindset, and what that means for product managers and their teams.

Key Learning Topics for this lesson include:

• Project to Product

• Flow of work through teams

Digital transformation brings numerous changes, but among the most important is transitioning to a product-focused model. When it comes to increasing productivity, creating value, developing agility, and driving customer-centricity, there’s simply no better approach than the product-oriented model.

Companies today must work and adapt rapidly to stay relevant and lead their industries. Moving from project to product changes the company’s focus to outcomes and growth instead of activities and programs. That paradigm shift brings incredible value as companies can create relevant products faster, improve existing products, and lead their industries into the future with innovative, customer-focused solutions.

Transitioning to a product-based approach can be challenging, but you aren’t alone. While the five-stage journey is well defined, the road to get to your destination can be difficult and nonlinear. In Dr Mik Kersten’s book, Project to Product, that path is charted using the Flow Framework®, a lean and prescriptive framework for technology leaders to guide and measure the journey.

There are many different types of products and as a product manager, you may be responsible for all or part of a whole product. Understanding the different types of products will help you decide on the required delivery models and how to manage your product

In this lesson, you will learn more about distribution strategies and how to define your product.

Key Learning Topics for this lesson include:

• Product Distribution Strategy

• Defining your product

It’s an age-old issue – even when the wheel was invented back in 3,000 BC, someone had to come up with the concept and make sure it was produced according to the requirements: to take a lump of stone or wood, put it on an axel and add a cart on top so things could be pushed around! At that time, one person probably hold all of the roles involved: product manager, designer, engineer and QA.

Fast forward a couple of millennia and most product historians agree that modern product management began in the early 1930s USA, in the advertising department of Proctor and Gamble’s Cincinnati office to be precise. That’s where a Junior Executive by the name of Neil McElroy had a brainwave.

McElroy was responsible for advertising a brand of soap called “Camay” but was being forced to compete with P&G’s far more dominant soap brand – “Ivory” – despite having less support and resources. When he decided this wasn’t the best way to achieve success, McElroy wrote a famous internal memo to his bosses recommending the creation of a new role called “Brand Man” who would manage each product, track sales and run promotions etc. With each product managed separately, Camay was able to compete with Ivory on an equal footing.

Did you know that 72% of all new products do not meet their revenue goals? Most new products fail. And start-up companies have the odds stacked against them. In fact, 75% of new businesses fail or cannot achieve significant adoption in the market. Many companies, large and small, make critical mistakes when it comes to building and managing products. That’s why Lean Product Management was created.

In this lesson, we'll discuss how the lean startup method applies to product management.

Key Learning Topics for this lesson include:

• The Lean Product Manager

• The Lean Startup Cycle

Frederick Winslow Taylor was an efficiency proponent who mourned lost productivity and waste. He wrote The Principles of Scientific Management in 1911, and while some of his ideas seem old-fashioned and even harmful today, others feel almost contemporary. We need fresh solutions for today’s problems, but we can still appreciate his early systematic and scientific approach to management.

We do all sorts of things wrong. We just aren’t very efficient; we create all sorts of waste. It’s not a matter of trying harder, but rather of working on the right things. Sometimes groups are efficient but at the wrong things. Sometimes people work hard doing the wrong things. We need to experiment to verify that we’re working on the right thing. The scientific method is the gold standard of learning through research, and The Lean Startup movement uses science to develop better organizations.

The manager is a systems engineer and the system is composed of humans. Sometimes people get so focused on the system that they lose sight of the human side of the equation. People are the source of innovation. It’s important that you don’t get so hung up on maintaining the system that the organization becomes overly rigid.