It’s a Tough Job but Someone’s Gotta Do It, Pt. V. How Jama Helps VPs of Product
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VPs of Product shoulder a formidable set of full-time challenges. Accountable to both business and engineering plans, a wise Product leader recognizes that clear communication and meaningful collaboration are a means to an end, and therefore matter as much as the goals.
Whether you’re managing performance and production with Agile, Scrum, Waterfall or a hybrid development methodology, dealing with obstacles and priority changes leaves you little time for error or waste. One overlooked production error, miscommunicated change in requirements, or delayed decision can, at best, increase the number of iterations and the production cycle.
When you oversee product development you’re also, in a way, overseeing people development, because people build products. And because people build products, it makes sense that the tools your people use must be built with an understanding of how people work together.
Whether your primary concerns are for traceability, requirements engineering and management, or enabling shared reviews of action items to ensure team alignment, if your product tools aren’t intuitive for engineering and business users, those tools won’t get used.
Choosing the right product development tools is a serious matter, because as a VP of Product, you have so much riding on building right and moving fast:
Tall tasks:
- Approving project plans, setting high-level product strategy across multiple projects and initiatives, ensuring that projects properly support strategic initiatives, and managing Profit and Loss.
Pressure points:
- Lacking visibility into key decisions that affect schedules, progress and outcomes.
- Struggling to find evidence that teams are building the right things that will deliver value to the customer.
- Avoiding detail overload.
Burning desires:
- To establish a high-level view of the entire portfolio of projects in order to quickly asses scope, risk, change and progress.
With Jama, VPs of Product can turn awkward “Growing Pains” episodes into agile “Greatest American Hero” epics.
How so? You’re able to…
- Keep the entire team aligned with the strategic goals of the organization.
- Gain greater visibility into what’s being built to ensure the product delivers on business value.
- Communicate easily with the entire project team to get clarification and decisions made, regardless of location.
- Ensure faster times to market.
Read Game Changers Who Play to Win: Omnigon to see a real-world example of the ways Jama can help VPs of Product stay on top of the product development game every step of the way.
Check out other ways Jama helps business and engineering teams get and stay aligned:
How Jama Helps Systems Engineers
How Jama Helps Project Managers
How Jama Helps Business Analysts
How Jama Helps Product Managers
Marc Oppy writes about requirements management, requirements traceability, developing safety-critical system and software requirements, systems engineering, and tips on how to write better requirements.
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