Product Management in the Open (Source)
Discussion encouraged by Larissa ShapiroOpen Source Bridge
Portland, OR June 18, 2013
([email protected], @larissashapiro)
Procedural Matters
Who am I
Who are you
What are we talking about
What is product management?
Classic:
“Product management is discovering, documenting, and prioritizing user stories
with the objective of maximizing some combination of users, sales revenue, and
profit. ”
Uuuuh.
What does the product manager do?
Listen to all the “stakeholders”Especially the users. All the people. A lot.
This is job one.
Get ALL THE data!
Market data, community data, user data, sales data!
Be the “voice of the user”
Define the roadmap. Collaboratively.
Write product “requirements” Collaboratively.
Are these jobs different, in open source?
Do open source projects need these things?
What does the product manager… not do?
Product manager does not equal project or program manager, except when it does
Product manager does not equal developer or architect, except when it does
Product manager does not always mean product “owner” in the Agile/Scrum sense
either, but sometimes it does.
Emphasize the Community
The often stated goal of product management is to solve real user problems
under real scenarios.
How better than with true community engagement
But what does that look like, for a product manager?
How does your project do it?
I personally especially want to know if folks have (or are) “volunteer” product managers
and how that’s going?
Kittens
Er, questions? Discussions!
Please don’t hesitate to bug me later. ([email protected], @larissashapiro)