Life of a Business Principal in Consulting

We talk about a lot of agile practices that enterprise needs to adapt. Continuous deployment is an engineering practices in the agile practices arsenal. Till recently, I was a vocal supporter of this practice for enterprise as well. Yet, a few thoughts and happenings have made me rethink blindly supporting this for the enterprise. I still support it but do it with a lot more rational approach. This is a sign of me understanding how enterprise read and understand agile.

Working in cross functional teams is the occupational hazard for product managers. A typical product manager needs to work with 3 kinds of teams: Engineering team - comprising of developers, testers and IT operations Sales / Marketing team Management team The product manager needs to have different set of information - or rather information represented and expressed in different ways for the three different teams. Engineering Team Focus: Focus on what needs to be done. Define clear milestones  Clearly communicate focus of the product and end user gain Help take decisions to architect the product Detail the product road-map from the engineering side Sales/Marketing Team Focus: Focus on what the product positioning needs to be Map the competitive landscape and find out how we are different from our competitors Clearly communicate the overall marketing / sales goals - with respect to details like channels, goal for the period Detail out the communication pla...