Review By: Bill Simpson
07/06/2011Agile Excellence is a good primer for product managers who are transitioning to agile but are not yet familiar with its primary principles. It is geared toward the novice product manager, and experienced agilists will find nothing new in this text. It answers the basic questions a product manager might have regarding his initial responsibilities to the team when moving to agile. If you're looking for a primer on Scrum that is slanted toward the product manager without going into too much detail, this is an excellent choice that can easily be read on a cross-country plane ride.

You can read each chapter alone, but together they form a relatively cohesive picture of generic agile processes. I found the lack of examples to be limiting, and I could easily see this book being twice as long if it presented more real-world information. This book would be an excellent primer for a product manager who has an accomplished ScrumMaster at hand as a guide, but I don't believe it provides sufficient information to drive a product manager alone to agile excellence.

There are two nuggets in this book that would be particularly helpful to the development team. The author does an excellent job of explaining the value of unit testing. He makes very clear that it is a strategic advantage for the product manager, who should insist upon it. In addition, the recipe for working across iterations to accomplish different objectives for different stakeholders gives an excellent view into what an effective product manager should attempt to accomplish. If you're having a hard time getting your team to transition, have the product owner read pages 105-106 and create a process-cycle efficiency chart. While none of this is new information, it’s packed together well and will give food for thought to a new product manager.

This book is relevant to today’s product managers and would be a good addition to their reading list. I would recommend that this, along with one or two of the other main works on agile, would prepare a product manager for life on an agile team. I plan to recommend this book to all of the product managers in our organization to augment what they've already learned. It is an easy read and worth the investment.