SVPMA Monthly Event - How Product Management Must Change with Catherine Connor, Rally Software February 4, 2009

Organization: SVPMA - Silicon Valley Product Management Association
Topic: How Product Management Must Change to Enable the Agile Enterprise
Speaker: Catherine Connor, Product Manager, Rally Software
Date: Wednesday, February 4th, 2009
Time: 6:30pm - 9pm
Location: Network Meeting Center at the TechMart - 5201 Great America Parkway, Santa Clara
Cost: Free for Members. $25 for pre-registered Non-Members. $35 at the door.
More info: http://svpma.org/meetings.html
Presentation:
As more development teams adopt agile processes to increase their responsiveness to customer needs, product managers must change the way they work to keep up with faster development cycles and shorter customer feedback loops. Product managers new to agile soon realize that agile processes require more involvement from their group. Given that most product managers are already overworked, how do they manage these new activities to best serve the agile enterprise and to derive more value from software projects and products?

In this presentation, Catherine will discuss her experiences as a product manager who has transitioned into the agile world. She will also share several best practices that Rally's agile coaches deliver to customers as they help them successfully transition to Agile.
Speaker:
Catherine Connor is a product manager at Rally Software, the Agile lifecycle management leader dedicated to making development organizations leaner and more responsive to customer needs. She started at Rally as a director of product marketing then transitioned to a role in product management in 2008. She focuses on Rally's product and portfolio management solutions. Her latest work includes delivering Rally Support Manager and Rally Product Manager, two innovative solutions that leverage leading Customer Relationship Management systems (Salesforce.com) to extend the benefits of agile to non-development stakeholders and help software companies be more responsive to customer needs.
Prior to Rally, Catherine was a product manager for the Borland CaliberRM product where she started applying agile methods and gained the valuable experience she will share in her presentation to other product managers today. Prior to Borland, Catherine was a requirements management evangelist for IBM Rational software products, preaching the Rational Unified Process.
Catherine blogs on Agile Commons (The Agile Product Management forum) where she enjoys answering questions about how to successfully transition teams to agile product management approaches.

Official Website: http://svpma.org/meetings.html