Dr Bart Jaworski's Linkedin Analytics

Product Manager can be a part of an Agile team or can be the main source of the problems of an Agile team. How come? Well, the productivity of the Agile team is usually as good as its weakest chain. If a key player "doesn't get it", your whole flow will be hurt. This will result in frustration, bad morale, missed goals, and anger. That's no place to work! So, how can you, the Product Manager (or Product Owner in the Agile lingo) make it bad? 1) Micromanaging PMs who dictate how to implement a feature rather than focusing on what needs to be solved will quickly kill team autonomy and motivation. Your devs are problem-solvers, not mindless code makers! 2) Positioning yourself at center stage If every meeting, update, and decision revolves around you, something’s wrong. A great PM facilitates collaboration and gives others room to shine, rather than acting as the sole authority. You do realize PM/PO should not attend daily, right? 3) Trying to appear as the technical expert You don’t need to know how to code to be a great PM. Pretending to understand things you don’t, or second-guessing engineers’ expertise, is a fast track to losing their trust. Let experts be experts. 4) Putting in too many meetings A bloated calendar steals valuable dev time. If they can’t get deep work done because of endless syncs and check-ins, productivity will nosedive. Make meetings count. I cancel a ton of meetings to give my teams time to code! 5) Expecting too many deliverables too fast Agile doesn't mean faster. Teams can deliver iteratively, but velocity has limits. The constant pressure to ship faster without thinking of trade-offs leads to burnout and half-baked features. Quality > quantity. 6) Resonating your own pressure and frustration to the team Stakeholders push PMs, and PMs push devs. Sounds logical, but bad idea. Your job is to shield the team from chaos, not amplify it. 7) Not listening to their feedback The team knows the real constraints and risks. Ignoring their insights will backfire when things go wrong. Listen, adjust, and trust their expertise. It's OK to challenge your team, but it's not to do it endlessly. 8) Making Agile process a waterfall in disguise Planning is good, but rigid roadmaps are not. If your backlog is locked in 6 months ahead and changes feel like a project management crime, you’re not Agile: you’re just calling waterfall by another name. With this, all Agile structure looses ALL sense. That's it! Hopefully being aware of those potential dangers will prevent you from making those mistakes yourself. Are you guilty of any of those points? Sound off in the comments! #productmanagement #productmanager #agile P.S. I've started a newsletter! To get a much longer form version of my writing with many additional insights, be sure to subscribe: https://lnkd.in/gX3YNCpk