Product Management and DevOps, together at last and kicking butt

The good, bad and ugly of how Sendgrid is incorporating Product Management practices into planning and execution within their DevOps and Platform teams to cut off scope creep, never ending projects and realizing value for internal teams.

Dev Ops and Platform teams have too many projects, not enough time and users who are an email, message or quick walk away to tap you on the shoulder to ask if that thing is done because it is really holding them up from completing something for real this time. We will talk through some tried and true product management practices that will help solve the problems of never ending projects, squeaky wheels that demand priority and projects that flop on launch.

We will talk at a high level about some common product practices and the experience of introducing those at Sendgrid in the Tech Ops org.

  • Validating problems through customer interactions
  • Using story maps to get to first and fast release
  • Launching products for adoption
  • Getting user feedback and incorporating it into the backlog
  • Sunsetting a product

Speaker

James Heimbuck

 
James has spent the last 14 years in B2B and B2C Product Management roles at companies such as Webroot Software, Blueprint (formerly Craftsy) and HomeAdvisor. In his current role at Sendgrid he is ...