Tag: #prodmgmt

/ geoffand

Product Owner barely being ready with backlog to start planning?

Just curious if I am unique.  I am the Director of Product Management, and have a staff of 6.  I am the product manager for our main product line (about 80% of our business), and I play the Product Owner.  Today was planning sessions, and as usual, I was working on my backlog until late last night.  It seems like I get it done in time, but it is always a crunch to get it done.  

Does anyone else barely get the coming iterations stories and acceptance criteria done on time?  I am fortunate that I have a deep well of ideas, and a knack of pulling it all together as needed, but all effort to get an iteration or two ahead have been thwarted.

/ geoffand / 1 Comment

We don’t give date estimates for bug fixes. Quit asking.

As a long time product manager, one of my pet peeves is the bug/hotfix process.  Stepping back, we have a well defined triage process, where a good team of dev, support, and support engineers (as well as myself) sit in a room, and agree on priority, severity, and even whether it is a defect, or just desired different behavior requested.  This works well.

Issues are brought in, verified, assigned severity (and if there is a work around, that lowers the severity, as you would expect), and tossed into the queue.

The maintenance team, 3 developers, then pull items from the queue in FIFO with some stack ranking due to priority.  At any one time we have 30 – 60 issues in queue.

What this rant is about is the constant badgering I get from sales.  “When will issue X be done?”  “Why isn’t {insert pet issue} done yet”, “I am going to go to the division GM if you can’t give me this this week”, among other less printable comments.

As there is a queue, and it is ranked by priority and severity, we get to them as we get to them.  We do not make duse dates available.  I will not commit to more than “It is in the queue, and the team will address it”.  

Sigh, I seem to lose 2 hours a week in these pointless discussions.  I have an idea, why don’t you find a bug in Windows, and call Microsoft support.  See how much “pull” you have there.