Design
Product Management
Demystifying Product Management
By Ashu Chatterji, CEO at Caravel Labs Less than 40% of software projects using modern software engineering practices meet their intended business goals, provide the expected value and satisfy the needs of their users. This is according to the latest report from Standish Group, which has been researching the success rates of software projects for over 25 years. That proportion used to be even less when waterfall approaches were dominant – just over 10% projects were successful back then, but thanks to the widespread adoption of iterative and incremental development (often termed as “Agile development”) and increasing emphasis on removal of developer toil using automation (often termed as “DevOps”), significant improvements have been made. However, a less than 50-50 chance of project success is outrageous, especially in an age where innovators and changemakers depend so heavily on software engineering to scale their impact towards a sustainable future for our planet. It is therefore no surprise that the business of planning, developing, launching, and managing a product or service has become particularly critical to the success of software engineering efforts, and software product management has emerged as a key performance differentiator in the world of software development. When McKinsey published their report on the correlation between business agility and developer velocity in 2021, one of the core differentiators was an organization’s product management capabilities (the others being tools, culture and talent management). Incidentally, a conspicuous absence in defiance of prevailing wisdom was the absence of “Agile team practices”.
