Women in Agile Podcast Highlights
I recently had the pleasure of being part of the “Women in Agile” podcast (available here).
In the podcast, I discuss infusing product management with agile principles and practices. Leslie Morse, the podcast interviewer, summarized the highlights of our conversation as follows:
“Ellen speculates a future where there will be a “blending of disciplines where you don’t necessarily have a business area and a technology area”, just one product team with interdisciplinary team members. Her piece of advice to product people: Have strategic awareness of your product in the marketplace or “Big-View”, and get rid of junk in the backlog.
Gottesdiener also takes us down the memory lane to the beginnings of the Agile Conference – she has attended every one of them since Salt Lake City. She reminds us of the women who have had a large impact on the Agile community from the very beginning.”
We covered a range of topics, including:
- The convergence of product management and agile
- Shifting from project to product
- How to define your product
- The potential impact of product thinking on organizational design
- Introduction of the Agile Fluency™ model and product fluency
- The origins of retrospectives in the agile community
- The origins of agile from women in agile
Thoughts on Agile Product Management
As you listen to the podcast, I have listed key topics below. I have included the start times so that you can jump right to your favorite topic. The following topics are from my interview on agile product management:
- Products, not projects (which has been my focus since 2012) [2:41]
- Agile and product management: influences, shifts, and tensions [5:38]
- Confusion about answering, “What is our product?” [7:08]
- Defining your product as broadly as practical [8:57, 19:25]
- Product organization of the future [11:49]
- What agile people need to learn from the product community [16:29]
- Agile Fluency™ model overview and new product research inspired by it [17:27]
The Importance of Women in Agile
I took the opportunity to discuss a number of topics regarding the importance of women in agile:
- My origin story when I initially discovered adopting agile in software product development [20:37]
- Origins of iteration (a.k.a. “heartbeat”) retrospectives [24:32]
- Women heroines in engineering, testing, and coaching [28:24]
- Why agile principles are a natural for women [30:37]
- Things I’ve learned as a woman in agile [35:31]
Outstanding Women Contributors
There are specific outstanding contributors I mention in the podcast (in alphabetical order by last name):
- Lisa Crispin [28:24]
- Janet Danforth (deceased) [23:39]
- Rachel Davies [28:24]
- Esther Derby [25:50]
- Janet Gregory [28:24]
- Diana Larsen [17:27, 24:32, 25:50, 28:24]
- Linda Rising [26:32]
- Jean Tabaka, (deceased) [23:39]
References
Here are some references for further investigation.
Podcast Topics
- Rachel Davies Agile Coaching book
- Retrospective Facilitator Gathering
- Agile Fluency™ model
- Defining Your Product
Resources for Women in Product
- Women in Product (with chapters globally)
- Advancing Women in Product
Subscribe to the Women in Agile Podcast
Resources from Ellen
Read more in Ellen’s Blog
Ellen’s third book, Discover to Deliver, now available as a free pdf download on the Discover to Deliver book website
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