What is an Agile PM?

To me an Agile PM is quite simply an individual that understands and possesses fundamental PM skills and is aware of Agile principles, frameworks and tools and can be applied to his/her domain.

There is a very interesting conversation going on around this that I stumbled into and wanted to write a quick post about. I'll use my comments to those posts to convey my POV.

It started when I stumbled into the Enthiosys blog (which I've now bookmarked ;-)


How To Sound Smart (But Be Really Naive) About Dramatic Changes in Technology

Randomly stumbled into this blog, so writing this comment without complete context of your other posts. I disagree with the assumptions in this post or the industrial designer, assembly lang programmer, cook analogy.
The job of an industrial engineer hasnt changed. The tools have. An industrial engineer with good fundamental skills would be just as effective in the 1950’s as today. A good cook will be just as effective regardless of the tools, cause cooking is all about understand the fundamentals of how ingredients mix/blend/cook at various temperatures rather than the hi-tech gas range and ovens.

A good analogy might be an architect, has the job of an architect changed ever since man has been building wonderful structures? No, but the tools sure have.

Job skills are based on fundamentals and tools augment them. That’s why education is based mostly on fundamentals and add some applied perspective with tools.

I believe the skills and tools aspect of PM should not be mixed up. I’d take a PM with good fundamental skills any day and train them to use the latest and greatest tools/frameworks rather than have someone very fast on the tools/frameworks but weak in fundamentals.

So now to tie it back to your post, I think there are fundamental skills that a Product Manager should understand and possess and tools/frameworks like Agile/Scrum just augment them. Don’t get me wrong I’m not saying you don’t have to acquire additional newer skills to learn these new tools/frameworks to make your self more efficient/effective in what you do.
However to me it’s a layer that you put on top of the core skill set.

Then I went to the "Are agile PMs Baloney?" blog post they were referring to and here's what I think about it.

Came here from a on the Enthiosys site "How To Sound Smart (But Be Really Naive) ..." Loving the conversation here. I think the job of a PM is somewhere in the middle, not as skewed towards tools/frameworks as indicated on the Enthiosys blog and not as insulated from newer tools/frameworks as this post is trying to suggest. But I do agree with the gist of this post that the core of the PM job has not really changed, the tools have.

Job skills are based on fundamentals and tools augment them. That's why education is based mostly on fundamentals and add some applied perspective with tools.

I believe the skills and tools aspect of PM should not be mixed up. I'd take a PM with good fundamental skills any day and train them to use the latest and greatest tools/frameworks rather than have someone very fast on the tools/frameworks but weak in fundamentals.

I think there are fundamental skills that a Product Manager should understand and possess and good tools/frameworks like Agile/Scrum just augment them. Don't get me wrong I'm not saying you don't have to acquire additional newer skills to learn these new tools/frameworks to make your self more efficient/effective in what you do.

However to me it's a layer that you put on top of the core skill set.

Very interested in your thoughts.