The Agile Marketer

Appendix 2

The Product Manager's Perspective on Agile Marketing

My aim with The Agile Marketer is to make the case that marketing, product development, and product management must work in concert to create a better product and an enhanced customer experience—and in doing so, achieve competitive advantage. And while the preponderance of my research involved interviews and conversations with marketers, many of the ideas and examples in this book also (necessarily) came from the product development and management sides. Because these sides represent marketing's primary business partner in the modern marketing context, it seemed appropriate to provide readers more firsthand perspectives from seasoned product practitioners.

To that end, I interviewed three accomplished product developers/managers whose individual experience gives them important personal and even historical perspective on these questions. Each has used Agile in a wide range of product development contexts and throughout their careers, and all have strong feelings about the promise of the marketing/product partnership.

Kenneth Berger is a veteran product manager and advisor/investor. He was the first product manager at Slack, the office messaging application start-up founded in 2014. Berger helped the company (creator of one of the fastest-growing business apps in history) grow tenfold, from 100,000 to more than 1 million daily active users. Previously, he co-founded YesGraph, another enterprise start-up backed by ...