Okay. Disclaimers first : I believe agile is a good philosophy and provide a good method for development / execution. But I don’t practice it anymore …

I am a Product Manager for the past few years. Before turning into an Entrepreneur, I worked in a multi national firm which tried all its might to implement agile in various forms spending millions of dollars on training and implementation. **It worked for some teams, some teams still did waterfall agile, some just did agile for reporting purposes, some just used agile terminology to match the company lingo.**Then one fine day, I left the corporate world and turned into an entrepreneur. The Agile world went right out of the window. And I was talking strategy, goals, vision, targets, financials, valuations, customers, user experience and that too, all of it in one single day. A few years into entrepreneurship with mild success and then, I joined a mid sized company called Knowlarity ( a well funded startup with offices in India and south east asia) to lead the product management and strategy. I was heading the department and literally, working hard on product. Being the Core management team member, I was still thinking strategy and execution was a concern but not on a very high note. And then again, entrepreneurial bug bit me to startup second time.

Alright !! enough of my autobiography. Why did I give so much of the background ? To make a point that as soon as I started working like a real product manager, Agile was removed from my dictionary of product management.

Agile for product managers should be an enemy. If any product manager talks about agile, implementation etc., just throw him out of the office. He does not deserve to be a product manager.

While it’s not the fault of Agile, its the fault of Product Manager. A product Manager is supposed to be working on goals, strategies , product launches, customer feedbacks, user experience, designing new features, helping the teams resolve issues, bridging the communication channels between sales and marketing, working with CXOs and a lot more stuff. And while doing all this, how can he manage to talk about Agile.

Okay. it’s some academic learning time. Agile is a philosophy which contains various methodologies to help development teams to put development process in an iterative manner. Every Iteration contains a set of user stories or tasks which need to be solved. Adding any story or task in between of an iteration means removing some item from the list. At the end of an iteration, a demo happens and that’s where it is decided whether that iteration was able to achieve its goal or not. Each iteration can be as short as one week or can be as long as one month.

Now, let’s put some perspective to above academic stuff. In a decent size company (generalizing the team structures), An engineering manager is one to whom all developers / testers report to. Essentially, he is the people manager. He breaks the team into smaller units with team leads who run the iterations every alternate week. A Product owner defines the user stories and explain it to the development teams and helps them to break stories into tasks. Team leads along with product owner put individual tasks/stories into iteration and kick off the iteration with keeping engineering manager in loop. At the end of the iteration, the teams give an iteration demo.

Till now, all of the above looks fine ? but then, who is the guy reviewing the iteration or approving the iteration demos. Welcome Product Manager in the scene. Product Manager is just concerned about the output as he is worried about the end goal. He comes in every alternate week just to check the progress whether things are moving as planned and whether they are being developed as per what he has defined in the roadmap and larger user stories conforming to requirements. If things are not favourable in an iteration, he just shouts , escalates to engineering manager or to whole hierarchy including the CTO and makes life hell for development teams.

The last thing any product manager will do in his professional life is to understand agile based development process. Understanding this process puts him in disadvantage position to be sensitive to excuses of iteration based system. and if he falls for it, he’ll never be able to plan things.

Believe me, except development teams, no one in the company or outside give a shit to Agile. Do you think investors, customers, stockholders, management teams, support teams, sales teams, marketing teams even know about agile or give even a single minute of thought to it. They don’t even know about it. and they don’t even care. They only care to be product shipped on time with the best user experience, bug free with best customer support and with the best pricing along with super marketing strategies. And a product manager is busy in this role.

Agile is limited only to development teams. and a product manager works outside development teams. Following an agile process along with development teams makes a product manager weak and sooner or later, he’ll get fired anyway.

So, what to do then? If you carefully read this article again, there is a role called Product Owner carefully crafted by large MNCs just to bridge the gap between product management and development teams. Product owner is the one who takes the information dump from Product Managers , breaks it down into stories and tasks and co-ordinates with the development teams following agile practices. You can call this role as a Product Owner, Co-ordinator, development manager or anything which suits the fancy of your company.

But in any case, don’t let any product manager do any agile shit in your company or you are doomed forever.