Managing agile from technology to business

 This how I tend to look at management ownership in agile development (see previous blog entry for more on the alternate views of agile):

Where:

• The CTO owns technology and most often engineering teams.
• The Engineering Manager may be an inwards looking CTO and also own technology and engineering teams, but is often less owning technology and more owning agile processes and engineering teams.
• The Product Owner owns the team's product vision and possibly the customer strategy. She/he is a member of the development team or has a representative that is part of the development team.
• The Technical Product Owner owns the customer view of technology, may be a full fledged product owner, or may be a support member of a larger product owner team.

Individuals become more and more key enablers as your product and technology base become more advanced. A Servant Leader is then a manager (e.g. engineering manager) that helps individuals contribute in independence yet within orchestrated flows. This figure illustrates where the servant leader provides critical guidance (the red corners!):

Here, from the central diagonal outwards:

• The team iterates a technology and product development and review cycle, again, and again.
• In parallel, the team learns and explores productivity and innovation. Product does the same with their customers and market segment.
• Productivity issues are monitored. In a physical model of agile processes 'high momentum' is high productivity. Servant Leaders help monitor for issues such as unsustainability, diverging focus, low or over capacity, and help teams and product avoid or resolve these issues.

 My experience is:

• Product Owner and CTO have too much "skin in the game" to be effective servant leaders. Therefore engineering managers and technical product owners (when they have only partial ownership) have a critical servant leader role to play to help all deliver better.

All original content copyright James Litsios, 2022.