My good readers,  it's been a while since I've written to you all, lots going on- trade show season is finally at a close, the kiddies are all back in school and fall is in the air.   Meanwhile at the old farm, we've undertaken an initiative to move all of our development teams to Agile/Scrum.   As the 'best practices' guru of our organization this has entailed some pretty extensive thought time regarding product management as a profession.  

Too look into Agile, what becomes apparent is that many of the reasons that product management began as a profession have eroded over time and one must seek to understand the value that product managers can bring to the business today.  

What reason's have eroded you might ask?  It feels as if product management's adoption in the service and technology sectors was due to a need to conserve the precious resource of product development.  Development was expensive,  it required a large investment in hardware, an expensive investment in developers and testing and finally an extensive marketing campaign involving shipping of software, direct mail etc.    Look at us now. 

Kickstart, jumpstart and other funding vehicles has eliminated the large dollars needed to go to market.   Amazon cloud has replaced the need for heavy hardware investments and coding; with frameworks, tools and other helpmates is not as expensive as it once was.  

Therefore, the value of the product manager is no longer as sifter of ideas- limiting the number of people that touch development and instruct development.   It's something entirely different.

Product managers today must help their organization create ideas.   Vet those ideas with clients, prospects and the market.  Determine if the market is willing to pay for those ideas ongoing (at least for a little while).  
Product managers that find themselves simply 'me tooing' the competition are not adding value.   In fact are decreasing value as their actions simply spend money to bring no additional value to the overall market place - there is probably some high brow equation for this- such as the current cost of cash * the future value of innovation that could have been brought to market with the same funding / time- or something of that sort = the value lost.

So given the very detailed assignment of product owner,  how do we balance the tasks associated with product owner with the increasingly needed ideation role of the product manager?    

More to come,  I'll leave you here this week- there is a lot to think about in the above- ponder all of the barriers to entry that have been eliminated in most fields.   Almost any start up can rent some 'space' in the cloud, start coding tomorrow and be your competitors in a matter of weeks.   Likewise the barrier to entry that the product manager created to access development has gone way too.