by Merrill R. (Rick) Chapman We've been seeing a great deal of industry press these days discussing "the Agile Product Manager." There are a plethora of new books, new training courses, and new "tools" that are supposed to transform yesterday's slow and sluggish product manager into a new sort of sleek, streamlined being, something akin to Tony Stark in an Iron Man suit streaking through the sky on a mission to save the software industry from the Sloth Monster and pull trapped revenues and profits from the Slough of Despondency. Unfortunately for all involved, these articles, training courses, and tools are a waste of time (and money) for SaaS companies. Before going further, let's get to the main points of this article right away Agile methodologies were never designed nor have they evolved in any practical way to encompass the job of product managers. All the training programs that you may have been reading about that purport to teach your product managers to be "Agile" or "work" in an Agile environment are pointless and should be avoided. There are other areas of your SaaS business where you need to be spending your money (we'll discuss where later on). There is...