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Eric Cussen

Chief Transformation Officer

Marc Story

Enterprise Agile Coach

Product should be your biggest champion of agility!

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Let’s not do that again…

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We both need to talk during this slide

Obviously this isn't a story of “everything is great”

Set up: This is a concept we’ve been thinking about for years and now with years of experience and benefit of hindsight, we thought this story captured what we think has always been true but rarely the case in reality…
Marc - History of IT driving agility, Premise: list of reasons why Product should drive it slide
We need to explain why this (product not being the driver) is a big problem.

IT only exists to support the product or service so if Product isn’t driving, the inmates are running the asylum
Product doesn’t want to be told how to work by IT yet both need to work effectively as a team
Product teams aren’t always good at validating assumptions quickly at low cost. Lean thinking
Many Product teams, in a silo, will focus on the How instead of the What
Product is good at describing the problem (What) and engineers are good at designing solutions (How)
The Why, helps w/priority
If IT drives agility, it adds more to an existing cost center. If Product drives, agility becomes an investment in the product/service

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Our vendors were not happy

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Our customers were interested but skeptical

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We can solve the transfer problem!

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I’m just doing what it says…

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Image of someone being invited into a room with a team inside doing work and flip charts and sticky notes on the wall

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How did we go so wrong?

Requirements did not create a shared understanding
Technology followed instructions
The assumed answers were delivered as requirements
We did a fully scoped project vs. building a product to address the market need
Product and Technology failed to collaborate
We had no feedback loop
Technology drove the process and interactions
We assumed we knew many things that in reality, we didn’t have a clue
The requirements limited the design and results

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Product rarely leads the Agile evolution

Why is this a problem?

IT is imposing Agile on other departments
Product isn’t bought in
Generates a tremendous amount of waste
Single solution design prevents better solutions from emerging
High opportunity costs
We are missing market windows or hitting them with the wrong product
Promised business results are not being delivered
True agility comes at a cost

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20 year old lessons are still relevant

Project thinking is fatally flawed when it comes to successful product development
Companies suffer the opportunity cost of doing the wrong thing
This repeats every single day at the companies that most need to break the pattern
Product has agile “done to them” by Technology, and often Technology doesn’t know that Agile is supposed to be done in service of Product
Without understanding, Product resists
Product and technology pretend to collaborate but in reality, they still operate in silos

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Our Hypothesis

“If Product asks the right questions, it will force agile practices to answer those questions.”

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Technology is trying to sell the wrong product to Product - they don’t understand they even have a need
Help them that they can ask for things differently than they are accustomed - requirements aren’t required and are, in fact, a fallacy
Asking something be delivered in a way that is faster than what technology is prepared for will trigger new ways of working
If you technology group is already agile you have a match

Marc/Eric - End w/talking points about what we've learned in the story and since then. Go through the talking points. - slide

Get the hypothesis right - “we can move audiobooks to an iphone using a web browser”
Limit your investment size (time, money, opportunity cost)
Use Product as your champions for agile ways of working
Put Product and IT in a room together often
Product is the beneficiary

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“If we can move an audiobook to a device in one click using only a browser we will sell more/get more content?”

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It's Never About Agile.

…So what should you do?

"It's not about Agile (for Product), it's about speed of answers, innovations and meeting customer needs. Agile is simply the mechanism that provides the desired result.”

Find a champion in your Product organization
Stop using Agile words. Use language that makes sense to them
Be curious. Work to understand the problems they’re trying to solve
Partner with them to explore ways of presenting problems differently
Show, don’t tell
Frame the value of IT driven work in business terms

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?

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