In the next webinar in our LPM in Practice series, Jim Fowler SPCT and Strategic Advisor at Scaled Agile, addresses your common question: What about budgeting?
When:
June 13, 2024, 11:00 am – June 13, 2024, 12:00 pm EST
This session will look at the origins of the annual budgeting process, the difficulties we face today, and what we can do differently. It is designed to give you the context and talking points to advance into lean budgeting in your organization.
Unlock Unprecedented Productivity: The Flow Metrics Path to Agile Success
Whether you are new to the concept of flow metrics or looking to deepen your understanding and application, this session will equip you with the knowledge and tools to start leveraging flow metrics for remarkable improvements in your organizational performance.
When:
April 24, 2024, 10:00 am – April 24, 2024, 11:00 am MST
Where:
Zoom
Who:
Agile Leaders, LACE Leader, Product Manager, SAFe Practice Consultant, SAFe Program Consultant, Transformation Leader
In today’s competitive business landscape, attaining enterprise agility is more crucial than ever. Many are intrigued by the potential of Value Stream Management (VSM), yet find it intimidating and overly complex, even a colossal challenge. What if the journey to enterprise agility could be significantly simplified?
This session focuses on demystifying “flow metrics” – it’s the fastest and most effective path to extract immediate value for any organization. Flow metrics offer a lens through which organizations can view the efficiency, speed, and quality of work moving through their processes.
By attending this webinar, you will learn:
– What Flow Metrics Are: An introduction to flow metrics and their role in tracking the movement and delivery of value in the enterprise.
– Why They Matter: Explore the critical importance of flow metrics in identifying bottlenecks, reducing waste, and improving overall system performance, leading to enhanced enterprise agility.
– How to Get Started: Practical steps to begin collecting and analyzing flow metrics, even without fully implementing Value Stream Management (VSM). We’ll break down the seeming complexity of VSM, showing how any organization can derive significant value from flow metrics.
–Transformative Insights: Discover the kinds of insights flow metrics can provide and how these insights can be used to make informed decisions, prioritize work, and drive continuous improvement.
According to a PwC survey, 55% percent of those in the technology and IT fields felt they had missed a job opportunity due to insufficient network. In this session, we’ll cover both a strategic mindset/approach and tactical steps you can take starting today.
Benefits and methods for in-person vs. virtual networking
Breaking the ice and developing meaningful connections
Achieving consistent, sustainable network growth on LinkedIn
Take advantage of existing groups like Meetups, role-specific groups like RTE and SPC circle, in-person events, etc.
We’ll help you develop simple, repeatable processes for building your network in a way that lasts long-term!
Speakers
Chandler Karadsheh
Sr. Content Marketing Manager at Scaled Agile, Inc.
Mike Alber
Director, Community Engagement at Scaled Agile, Inc.
We’ll cover the latest employer data for salaries, skill requirements, and experience expectations for SAFe Roles in 2024. Unlike the next leap day, you shouldn’t wait another four years to prioritize your next career move.
Our comprehensive report delves into the current job market for six key SAFe roles (based on Q4, 2023 data):
In this one-hour session, we’ll review the report highlights and our upcoming releases to help you with specific professional development goals, skill growth, and new AI tools for enhanced productivity with SAFe.
Speakers
Tamara Nation
VP, SAFe Professionals at Scaled Agile, Inc.
Thomas Vong
Sr Director, Certification and Recognition at Scaled Agile, Inc.
By reducing the routine, repetitive tasks that create toil for the individual contributor, Gen AI tools enable more ‘time in zone’ for higher-order, critical thinking work.
When:
December 13, 2023, 10:00 am – December 13, 2023, 11:00 am MST
Where:
Zoom
Who:
Agile Coach, Consultant, Product Manager, Product Owner, Program or Project Manager, Release Train Engineer, SAFe Members, Scrum Master
In this session, we will unravel the potent capabilities of tools to streamline technology product development and elevate creative and strategic focus.
• Generative AI Overview: Dive into generative AI and its positive impact on SAFe roles, offering a competitive edge in the tech development landscape.
• Practical Application Examples: Witness real-world examples of how top-tier generative AI tools replace mundane tasks, ensuring optimal utilization of human effort for pivotal roles.
• Transition to Higher-Order Tasks: Learn strategies to redirect workforce focus from repetitive tasks to critical thinking assignments, catalyzing innovation and strategic growth.
Speakers
Cheryl Crupi
Methodologist and SAFe Fellow at Scaled Agile, Inc.
Rebecca Davis
Methodologist and SAFe Fellow at Scaled Agile, Inc.
Building, Operating, and Scaling AI-Enabled Solutions with SAFe
SAFe Enterprises often encounter challenges integrating AI technology into their production solutions. Early adopters of AI have found ways to address the common barriers to building, operating, and scaling AI-enabled products.
When:
November 15, 2023, 10:00 am – November 15, 2023, 11:00 am MST
Where:
Zoom
Who:
Agile Coach, Product Manager, Product Owner, Program or Project Manager, Release Train Engineer, Scrum Master
This webinar will examine the impacts of AI solution development on people, processes, and technology, as well as the commitments SAFe organizations should be prepared to make for creating desirable, viable, feasible, and sustainable AI solutions.
• Identify the new roles needed in Agile teams and ARTs, and the upskilling needed across all SAFe roles.
• Understand the new processes that must be added to the product development lifecyle to support AI solutions.
• Explore the new classes of tools that form the architectural runway needed to support AI development.
Speakers
Marc Rix
Methodologist & SAFe Fellow at Scaled Agile, Inc.
Harry Koehnemann
Methodologist & SAFe Fellow at Scaled Agile, Inc.
Dr. Wiselin Mathuram
SPCT, Chief Transformation Officer at International Business Consultants, LLC
Jeff Shupack
SAFe Fellow, President of Advisory Practice at Project & Team, Inc.
Join our virtual event on Wednesday, March 15, at 12:00 PM MDT/6:00 PM GMT to see the full launch and learn what it means for your organization. Sign up to receive a reminder one hour before the event to ensure you don’t miss it.
Welcome to the second post in our series about SAFe best practices to create a healthy relationship between product owners and product managers that drives product success. You can read the first post here.
I’ve heard lots of metaphors used to describe the relationship between a product owner (PO) and a product manager (PM). One of my favorites is oil and vinegar—separately, they’re just liquid on a salad, but mix them together and you’ve got a great dressing.
A PO and a PM working together creates a positive tension that leads to a great relationship—despite different opinions—that’s in others’ best interests. But combining the PO and PM into one role is a recipe for disaster.
I know because I experienced the trouble firsthand.
Think about the core responsibilities for both roles:
Be the voice of the customer
Analyze data
Manage backlogs
Make customers happy
Organize cross-team syncs
Create roadmaps
Support planning
Seek out competitive intelligence
Aid support escalations
Help sales activities
One person simply can’t do all these activities in a typical work week. When I’ve been in this situation, I found that the urgent, tactical things come first as people clamor for responses, feedback, and direction on their daily work—ultimately causing important strategies to suffer. Some days, I’d already made two to three stressful decisions before morning tea and was expected to make more at strategic levels. I quickly experienced decision fatigue. When your company and solution are small, you might be able to do it all, but it doesn’t scale.
There’s a strong stereotype that PMs need to be mini CEOs and be just as stressed out. That’s not sustainable as a product person. When a PM is also doing the work of a PO, expecting them to do strategy and manage the team backlog throughout the PI isn’t realistic. You miss the strategic work, you miss pivot-or-persevere opportunities. I’d often ask myself, “Am I really looking at the big picture or just surviving?”
The power of an Agile team is that it’s a high-functioning group that collaborates. And when the PO and PM roles are performed by two different people, they can work together to support those teams, and ultimately, the organization. When I was a PO working with a PM to deliver a new onboarding experience for our product, we stayed in sync. I focused on what our technology allowed and what the team could implement. She focused on market impact and educating our sales team. We had healthy, productive conversations with positive conflict about what should happen next, and split the duties of attending meetings. All while continuing our business-as-usual activities and still finding time to recharge for the next day.
If you’re a leader, avoid having one person take on both roles. If you’re doing both of these jobs, don’t. Perhaps there’s someone in your organization who can help you by serving informally in the other role. Finding the balance that I just described is key to your and your product’s success. POs and PMs don’t have to be in the same places but they need to connect, be aligned, and maintain that positive tension. It’s why we teach these roles together in our SAFe POPM class—you need to know how to best collaborate with your peer PO or PM to excel.
If you’re free on August 26 at 6:00 PM MDT, join Lieschen and I at an online Agile Boulder meetup where we’ll talk about this very topic.
Check back soon for the next post in our series about shared objectives and collaborative ‘sense making.’
About William Kammersell
William Kammersell is a Product Manager and SAFe® Program Consultant (SPC) at Scaled Agile. With over a decade in Agile software development, he loves researching customer problems to deliver valuable solutions and sharing his passion for product development with others. William’s journey as a developer, scrum master, Agile coach, product owner, and product manager has led him through a variety of B2B and B2C industries such as foreign language learning, email marketing, and government contracting.
Both product owners (POs) and product managers (PMs) have “product” in their titles. Both roles connect people to the customer to ensure we’re building the right thing. Both roles rely on data to inform decisions and spot trends by correlating that data to everything that’s going on across the organization. Both roles manage backlogs. And both roles make customers happy. So, what’s the difference between a PO and a PM?
Product managers concentrate on the program backlog and features, look one to three program increments ahead, and focus on product viability. They collaborate with business owners and those at the solution and strategic levels within SAFe®.
Product owners concentrate on the team backlog and stories, look one to three months ahead, collaborate with the team, and focus on product feasibility.
Seems straightforward enough, but we’ve heard feedback from people in the field that the PO-PM structure within SAFe isn’t so great.
“I’ve trained dozens of teams who are using SAFe and I have never seen this work well. The Product Owners are disconnected from their users and incapable of creating effective solutions for them that really solve their problems, because they do not understand the problems well. The Product Managers are essentially ‘waterfalling’ down the requirements to them and the teams are not allowed to prove if these are the right things to build or not. No one is doing validation work.”
—Melissa Perri, Product Manager vs. Product Owner
The feature factory
What’s described above is something many call “the feature factory.” Organizations quickly fall into the feature-factory trap when POs stop talking to external customers, going with the word of the PM instead and losing sight of the user’s needs. It also happens when PMs become disconnected from the teams, choosing to write requirements that are handed off to POs instead of aligning with teams and POs on objectives about how to best achieve them. By not connecting with the team, over time, PMs start making all the decisions on their own and there’s no room for teams to provide ideas to their own backlogs—essentially ‘waterfalling’ their PIs as described above and creating a culture of meeting acceptance criteria instead of focusing on objectives.
We often also see feature factories when PMs and POs never say “no” to requests from customers or business owners. Catering to the desires of a few large clients or to executives’ individual objectives can cause PMs and POs to drop validation work and strategy in response to those requests. Without validation work, there aren’t any clear pivot-or-persevere moments for checking in to see if we’re understanding the problem correctly or even solving their problems. Instead, we’re practicing waterfall and calling it SAFe.
In this blog series, William Kammersell, our curriculum product manager, and I will share practices to help you avoid the feature factory and create a healthy PO-PM relationship that drives product success.
Lieschen Gargano is an Agile coach and conflict guru—thanks in part to her master’s degree in conflict resolution. As the scrum master for the marketing team at Scaled Agile, Lieschen loves cultivating new ideas and approaches to Agile to keep things fresh and exciting. She also has a passion for developing best practices for happy teams to deliver value in both development and non-technical environments. Fun fact? “I’m the only person I know of who’s been a scrum master and a scrum half on a rugby team.”
