Earlier this week, I was talking with a friend of mine who had been recently promoted from Scrum Master/Product Owner[1] to being a project/product manager[2].

The issue they were experiencing was that they had a number of teams (think 10+), each of which was producing a good product, but the product as a whole was terrible. Also, the last time they tried to assemble a team to deal with this, it foundered because of intense opposition and inertia.

So, how do you deal with this, especially as a product manager in charge of the whole project, with no direct reports[3]?

We ended up almost working backwards to find a solution. When they were on a team, their sideways management[4] style was to learn how each of the people tick, and to help fit them with doing the work that was best for them.

My first idea was to have a working group with a member of each of the teams, where they would work together to make all the parts work better as a whole.

To me, this felt like it was iffy, and could easily be torpedoed by a small number of people obstructing it, or even not being engaged.

So, we came up with something simpler. In any project of this size, there must be some more obvious pain points, and some people who are more interested in collaborating to solve them. So, you just need to get a few people in a room together. Maybe only two. You find a few quick wins where they can quickly show the benefits of working together. Maybe the things they’re working on are even useful to their own teams.

To me, this is really using the Agile principles the way they’re supposed to be used. You find the most obvious problem, find a small number of people who are most interested in solving it, get some quick wins, and then spiral out from there.

We’ll see how well this ‘Agile from Below’ worked. Here’s hoping.

[1]This is how they described it, but didn’t go into detail, and I might have misheard it. If true, I’m not sure how this would work in practice, perhaps as a counterweight to supervisory management?

[2]They described it as one or both of these, and the role described above could be defined (as far as I know) as either. Thinking about it some more, it feels more like a product management role, which is how I decided to write it above.

[3]That you can direct. Ha!

[4]I use ‘sideways management’ to mean things positions like ‘Scrum master’, where your job is to remove blocks from people who don’t report to you.