The panel will explore questions like:

• Are both roles necessary, or are they really the same job?
• How are product manager and product owner responsibilities similar and different in Agile?
• How does the product manager role change when an organization transitions to Agile?
• What is the right balance between customer interaction and guidance for the development team?
• What sort of background and temperament is required for each role?

This will be a joint meeting of Agile New England and the BPMA. Bring your questions about the product owner and product manager roles to this session. Whether you are new to Agile or an expert, please join us in what is sure to be an exciting panel discussion.

About the moderator and panelists:

Moderator

Bruce McCarthy, founder of UpUp Labs, has spent a lifetime as a builder and innovator. Bruce has a passion for understanding customer needs and creating compelling solutions. He has founded three companies and has led teams in organizations ranging from startups to market leaders such as Art Technology Group, Oracle and D&B. His executive-level positions include, most recently, VP of Product at NetProspex. He has demonstrated his leadership in areas ranging from marketing to acquisitions (on both sides of the table) to product management, development and design. A dedicated evangelist for better products and product development, Bruce founded UpUp Labs in 2012. Through it, he help product teams develop products that make a difference and applies his expertise to building innovative new tools like Reqqs, the smart roadmapping tool, now in private beta. Bruce is a prolific blogger on product management topics, as well as an organizer and sought-after speaker at product management, development, and innovation events. He was recently a judge at the Harvard Business School New Venture Competition.

Panelists

Vanessa Ferranto is a senior product manager with experience establishing Agile and product methodologies. Vanessa started in financial services where she leveraged financial market data to deliver products that supported institutional sales and investor relations teams. At Boston.com and WGBH, she led the content management system products for the publication of digital content in a responsive web design framework. More recently at Leaf, Vanessa managed development of an android mobile point-of-sale application with corresponding web configuration and analytics interfaces. Currently she is working on the definition and roadmap of business services that bring complex analytics and solutions to SMB business owners.

Ellen Gottesdiener, Founder of EBG Consulting, Inc. (www.ebgconsulting.com), is an internationally recognized leader in the collaborative convergence of requirements + product management + project management. Ellen coaches and trains individuals and teams, and facilitates discovery and planning workshops across diverse industries. She helps global clients excel with requirements and business analysis, product and project management practices, and collaborative workshops for product discovery, planning and roadmapping, team chartering, and retrospectives. She writes widely, and she keynotes and presents worldwide. Her latest book, co-authored with Mary Gorman, is Discover to Deliver: Agile Product Planning and Analysis. Ellen is author of two other acclaimed books: Requirements by Collaboration and The Software Requirements Memory Jogger.

Matt Kaplan serves as LogMeIn’€™s Senior Vice President of Products. Matt is responsible for directing product strategy, product management, and engineering for all of LogMeIn products worldwide. An experienced product executive and startup veteran, Matt has championed the successful creation of online products and services using Lean and Agile practices. Prior to LogMeIn, Matt held senior product development and executive management positions for Cambridge Technology Partners, AGENCY.COM, PermissionTV, Pearson, and KnowledgeVision. Matt holds a B.S. in Mathematics with Computer Science from MIT.

Piyum Samaraweera is Constant Contact’€™s VP of Product Management and is responsible for managing and directing the Product Management Group and its activities. Piyum has over 15-years experience in product management with the last 10-years in delivering SaaS/Cloud based solutions to small and medium sized businesses. Prior to Constant Contact, Piyum served as Senior Director of Product Management at Sophos where he and his team were responsible for bringing Sophos’ security solutions to Cloud. Piyum earned his BA in Political Science and Economics from the University of Rochester and MBA in Management Information Systems from Bentley’€™s McCallum School of Business.