The Making of Great Products-The people and roles involved

While it takes a lot of good people and resources to build a great product, there are three key roles that need to be a part of the core team. These three key people have to represent the needs of different stakeholders, for a product’s overall success. They are:

* The product manager

* The user experience lead

* The product engineering lead

The role of the product manager is to make sure that the product has value – he does his research, knows his target audience and defines the product functionality.

The user experience lead represents the user’s behavior and literally puts himself in the users’ shoes.

The product engineering lead is often an architect or senior engineer and is responsible for ensuring that the product that is defined is something that can actually be delivered.

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Agile-Changing the rules of the game!

When Agile first started making an appearance, it was viewed as yet another development fad. But with Agile showing dramatic improvements in delivery time, quality of software and a reduced number of strategic mistakes compared to the waterfall model, it has taken a broader role in software development today. A number of companies practice Agile as a product development methodology from project inception to delivery, support and end-of-life phases.

However, Agile is not about using Scrum, Extreme Programming or RUP. It’s about using the best agile practices to respond to today’s frequently changing business needs. Using the waterfall model, frequent changes to software is difficult – the development cycle is long, systems are over engineered and end up costing a fortune.

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