Product Management | Agile

I was the Mac OS product manager for printing, type, and graphics at Apple. I was offered the position because I was a designer in Apple Creative Services—a target user who understood market needs. This allowed me to provide developers precise requirements about the design market. I’ve been a PM at several other companies in my career, sometimes in the absence of a formal PM hire.

I was formally trained in Agile when I was at Avaya. This has allowed me to integrate user experience design into Agile development processes at many companies.


Agile

I was trained in Agile while at Avaya. I have over 15 years experience integrating design deliverables into Agile processes.

This is an Agile-based user experience delivery timeline (VIEW FULL TIMELINE▸). Each line item is an Jira ticket/Agile story. The blue bars show estimated time required to create, review, update, and then deliver a design for each story. Gray arrows pointing to the right indicate the sprint when the development team will actually begin work on a given story. The goal is to make sure each story design is delivered prior to the sprint when it would actually be needed.

Because I participate in the entire Sprint Zero story creation and prioritization effort, I can coordinate with dev and PM leads to make sure Design delivers what’s at the start of any given sprint, if not earlier.

For example, look at story 4.7.1 (part of the Design feature, “Complete call log”) in the schedule above. My team needed to work on 4.7.1 in the context of other call log stories, the designs for which were needed for Iteration 3 (i.e. Sprint 3). The design requirements for 4.7.1, however, weren’t needed until Interation 5.