Product Management in the Open (Source)

Discussion encouraged by Larissa ShapiroOpen Source Bridge

Portland, OR June 18, 2013

(lshapiro@mozilla.com, @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. (lshapiro@mozilla.com, @larissashapiro)