Product management is becoming a well-accepted role in the software industry. Being one of the major forces of the success of a product, the product manager is responsible for managing all requirements, the release planning, the roadmap, and the lifecycle decision making.

At Utrecht University we have developed two product management tools: the so-called Competence Framework and the Maturity measurement tool for Software Product Management. The Competence Framework organizes process knowledge and tooling for the product manager, and sets the scope for the collaboration with the internal stakeholders in the company. We will present the Competence Framework and we discuss opportunities for product manager to manage their products better. The Maturity Matrix is a means to assess the current capability of product management, plus it identifies opportunities for process improvement. We report about the benchmarks obtained from 160 maturity assessments conducted so far in the software industry. Furthermore, we discuss our extensive experiences on the role of product managers with Scrum and DevOps, and the dilemmas of the product manager versus the product owner.

It’s common sense that products need to satisfy customers expectations and needs. But how to know about those? It’s natural to sit with your first 5 customers, but how to manage the customer engagement with a growing number of customers, growing number of products, customers in all regions of the world? The sessions describes how SAPs approach for engaging with customers matured over time, into a systematic approach for involving customers in strategic discussions and development of new products / product versions, as well as feeding experience from usage of the software back into product improvements. Legal aspects are covered, as well as newest processes to cope with challenges from Cloud customers.

Dr. Guido Menkhaus, Dr. Heinz Haefner – SAP SE

Rich Mironov will present a keynote the Software Product Summit bringing a Silicon Valley perspective on some key topics:

• Product leadership versus IT-style product fulfillment
• Continuous, outside-in validation and customer discovery
• Championing users rather than stakeholder satisficing