Client Access Required
I was reading an article by Jean Tabaka on the 11 Ways Agile Adoptions Fail and her number 5 reason "Product Owner is Consistently Unavailable" hit a cord. In it she states
An unavailable product owner perpetuates the wait time and creates waste
Having experienced this in the past, I can't agree more.
At Ephox our Product Manager plays the role of client in our iterations. As part of his role he spends a certain amount of time travelling. In the past we tried to continue development while he was away. What we found was that, even though he was available via email and phone, his lack of availability within the office while a feature was development caused delays and in some cases wasted work.
The way we've dealt with this, especially with an increase in Product Managers recently, was to have agreement that, as the client, if you were not available your development release would stop at the end of the iteration. The team would then work on stories in the next iteration for the other product manager or spend time on process improvements within the Engineering team.
August 31st, 2007 at 4:22 pm
As the product manager in question, I have an interesting element to add to this and that is that sales and marketing can suffer from the same thing.
In a product company I’ve found that there are few people who know the product better and articulate all of its benefits than the product owner/product manager. I’ve seen that time and again within Ephox and with many other product companies. Just as development experiences wastage when the product manager is absent, sales and marketing can experience the same. In Ephox it doesn’t help that much of the sales team is in the USA and the development is in Australia. The symptoms of this with sales and marketing might be feedback not getting through to product management, not being able to position the product as well for a particular market or simply not being able to close deals as quickly.
As with all things in business there’s a balance and I know that Brett appreciates this and I think that having multiple people able to fulfil the client role for the engineering team is a great step in the right direction.