Slides I presented during the guest lecture in Product Management class at Leavey School Of Business, SCU on 9/28.

1. Agile Deepdive
Sept 28, 2017 @SCU Leavey School of Business

2. Agenda
1 Introduction
2 History of Software Development Process
3 Waterfall
4 Agile Deepdive

3. Introduction
Abhijith Prabhudev
Role: Senior PM @vmware
Products: #vsphereclient, #vcsa
#life: batch of 2015, #engineer
Connect: aprabhudev @APrabhudev virtualnreal.wordpress.com

4. History of Software Development
Process
- Prior to 1990 - Traditional Software Development processes like Waterfall, V-
model, etc.,
- Post 1990 - Emergence of Lightweight Methodologies like Scrum, Extreme
Programming, etc.,
- Post 2010 - Agile framework for Large Enterprise Software Projects like Scaled
Agile Framework (SAFe)

5. Waterfall
Limitations:
● Change Management Difficult
● Big Upfront Planning
● Functional Silos
● Delays due to Hand-offs
● Heavy Documentation Overheads
● Late Availability of Working
Software
● Delayed Customer Feedback

6. Definition of “Agile”
Dictionary - “able to move quickly and easily”
IT Industry - “relating to or denoting a method of project management, used
especially for software development, that is characterized by the division of tasks into
short phases of work and frequent reassessment and adaptation of plans.”
More appropriate - “Ability to deliver business value to customers more frequently”

7. Agile Manifesto

8. Agile deepdive
Experienced in below:
- Scrum
- Extreme Programming (XP)
- Scaled Agile

9. Agile deepdive - Scrum

10. Agile deepdive - Scaled Agile

11. Agile Deepdive - Product Roadmap

12. Agile Deepdive - Product Backlog

13. Agile Deepdive - Product Backlog
● There is only one backlog
● Feature didn’t get prioritized or missing in
backlog, don’t panic. If it is important, it
will come up again
● Highest Priority item always at the top
○ “If I had to deliver tomorrow, which
one of these two things would we
want to do”
● Constant grooming of the backlog

14. Agile Deepdive - Roles
● Product Manager/Product Owner – Owns the Product Backlog
● Developers – Self running teams, builds and owns the Product Codebase
● Designers – UX/UI/User Research/Visual Design/Interaction design
● Stakeholders – Executives not directly involved in the project, but have stake in results
● Other roles:
○ Program Managers
○ Release Managers
○ Engineering Managers
○ Scrum Masters

15. Agile Deepdive - Role of a PM
● Liaison between the Business and the Product
● Connects the Customers to Designers and Engineers
● Think more about “Why” and then “What” than “How”
● Build the Product Roadmap
● Own the Product Backlog and constantly prioritize to
retrofit customer feedback and changing business needs
● Deliver value to customers more frequently
● If customers don’t need it, don’t let engineers build it
● Be quantitative and qualitative

16. Agile Deepdive - Role of a PM
● Convert User needs to User Stories and Prioritize them
Source: https://trello.com/c/e9AVCN2m/1-pivotal-labs-client-pm-
playbook
Source: https://blog.intercom.com/using-job-stories-design-features-ui-ux/

17. Agile deepdive - DevOps

18. Agile Deepdive - DevOps
● Code -> Automated testing -> Continuous Deployment -> Measure -> Code
● Culture change
● Dev Owns Quality
● Continuous Integration (CI) + Continuous Deployment (CD) => Pipeline
● Applicable mostly for SaaS solutions or Hosted Applications
● Some flavor can be applied to Shrinkwrap/Enterprise applications
● Relevant term - AB testing

19. Agile Deepdive - Tools
Tool Purpose Things to ponder - FWIW
Aha Product Roadmap Excellent for Product Roadmap, lacks capability of
project management (when compared to Jira)
Jira Agile Project
Management
Excellent for overall Agile Project Management but
has many nuts and bolts, could be overwhelming
at times.
Very good integration with documentation tool
Confluence (Atlassian suite of products)
Pivotal
Tracker
Agile Project
Management
Very simple agile project management tool, not
many confusing features like that of Jira

20. Agile Deepdive - Bestpractices
#1: Deliver Value in small chunks more often than delivering all at once
#2: Cultural Change
#3: Continuous Collaboration
Source: The three things which helped us transform from shipping software once every 12-18 months to every
week!

21. Agile Deepdive - Bestpractices
#1: Deliver Value in small chunks more often than delivering all at once

22. Agile Deepdive - Bestpractices
#2: Cultural Change

23. Agile Deepdive - Bestpractices
#3: Continuous Collaboration - Customer ⇔ PM ⇔ UX ⇔ Engineers

24. Agile Deepdive - Myths and Facts
● Agile is just a mini waterfall - #myth
● There is no planning in Agile - #myth
● PM has no role in Agile - #myth
● Agile is just a principle - #fact
● It is very difficult to transition to agile - #myth
● My customers do not need frequent releases - #myth
● Every project does not fit agile - #myth

25. Resources
● PM Playbook - https://trello.com/c/e9AVCN2m/1-pivotal-labs-client-pm-playbook
● Scaled Agile - http://www.scaledagileframework.com/#
● Agile Terms -
https://www.collab.net/sites/all/themes/collabnet/_media/pdf/gl/CollabNet_glossary_scr
um_agile_terms.pdf
● Agile Handbook - http://agilehandbook.com/agile-handbook.pdf
● Job Story - https://blog.intercom.com/using-job-stories-design-features-ui-ux/

26. Q&A

27. Backup slides