When I was hired as a Portfolio Manager and Product Owner Mentor at Ultimate Software, there were 29 scrum teams and one product owner on each, totaling about 200 people. Although our teams were grouped into our eight core business lines and products, each one seemed to be marching to slightly different corporate objectives. Our senior management realized that we had to address the problem by clearly defining our financial and market goals, and then evaluating how well our backlogs aligned with them.

In my 20 minute interactive presentation, I will introduce everyday techniques for driving the Enterprise Unified Backlog requirements down to the detailed Product Owner backlogs. Through the process of building our Unified Backlog, my company had to critically examine our staffing plan, team arrangement, and how we would cope with the inevitable silos of knowledge that many Agile organizations face. Agile promises senior executives that they can change priorities and requirements all the time. However, how can our product owners, managers, and scrum teams efficiently absorb those changes? We will talk about these, and other pressing issues in the quest for “product management agility”.

In the second half of the session, we will have an interactive discussion about the challenges that attendees are facing in their own companies. Though a group discussion, we will identify opportunities to apply these structured enterprise portfolio management techniques so that they can begin working on their own Unified Backlogs.