Core software product management activities

Abstract

Purpose Software product management (SPM) unites disciplines related to product strategy, planning, development, and release. There are many organizational activities addressing technical, social, and market issues when releasing a software product. Owing to the high number of activities involved, SPM remains a complex discipline to adopt. The purpose of this paper is to understand what are the core and supporting SPM activities. Design/methodology/approach The authors adopted the research method of meta-ethnography to present a set of techniques for synthesizing individual qualitative studies to increase the degree of conceptualization. The results obtained from three empirical studies were synthesized using the meta-ethnography approach to enhance, rethink, and create a higher level abstraction of the findings. Findings The results show that the study has both theoretical and practical contribution. As the meta-ethnography synthesis has not been widely applied in software engineering, the authors illustrate how to use this research method in the practice of software engineering research. The practical contribution of the study is in the identification of five core and six supporting SPM activities. Originality/value The practical value of this paper is in the identification of core SPM activities that should be present in any company practicing SPM. The list of supporting SPM consists of activities that are not reported to product manager but affect the product success.

Exploring the Relations Between Net Benefits of IT Projects and CIOs’ Perception of Quality of Software Development Disciplines

“…4). These OrdEval results might be surprising since Requirements acquisition is considered one of the basic building blocks of the software development (Kruchten 2009;Maglyas et al 2017) with high importance to software project success (Fernandez et al 2017). The results can be explained by the fact that recently many new requirement acquisition techniques and approaches have been developed (Ernst et al 2014;Lauesen & Kuhail 2012;Lucassen et al 2016;Raspotnig & Opdahl 2013) and are probably perceived as innovations by the CIOs of the studied enterprises.…”

Toward an Agile Product Management: What Do Product Managers Do in Agile Companies?

“…Product manager is a role uniting technical and business perspectives in developing software products to provide value to the customer [9]. Product management has been existing since its adoption at Procter &Gamble in the 1930s [17] but did not become popular in software organizations until the late 1990s (aka software product management) [7].…”

“…PMs participate in strategic management, are responsible for product strategy and product planning, and orchestrate development, market, sales, distribution, and service and support. Based on this framework, Maglyas et al [9] identified 12 activities that product managers are engaged in practice, where vision creation, product lifecycle management, roadmapping, release planning, and product requirements engineering are described as core activities (see Table 1 for the definitions). In addition to the core activities, the authors describe other activities that the product manager may be involved in but that can, in practice be delegated to other functions.…”

“…The academic literature has also been investigating product management for decades. We now have detailed descriptions of the activities that product managers are supposed to perform towards software development [7], the impact of these activities [8], and how they manifest in practice [9]. However, these descriptions seem to be based on a plan-driven approach, making it unclear whether they can guide product managers in agile companies.…”

Estratégia de Produto de Software a partir da perspectiva da Gestão do Conhecimento: um Mapeamento Sistemático

“…e planejamento (ciclo de vida, engenharia de requisitos, etc.) do produto de software [Ebert et al, 2014;Fricker, 2012;Maglyas et al, 2017]. A estratégia visa: especificar o valor entregue pelo produto de software em consonância com o modelo de negócios da organização, direcionar a evolução do produto de software em alinhamento com a estratégia da organização e especificar os requisitos e restrições de negócio (perspectiva interna da organização) e mercado (perspectiva externa à organização) que devem ser considerados no processo de software.…”