Make Product Thinking Real

Does your developer really know why the product exists? What is the product used for? How about the BA? or anyone in the organisation?

The agile development approach is around service delivery. Delivering VALUE.

It is a service, they cannot control what the customer wants but they can help the product team to find out and collaborate with customers. The delivery of the service is project management. But the overall satisfaction of the outcome is product management.

When it comes to delivering IT projects as a service, the Agile Manifesto does make sense. The manifesto shows the principle of “how” we get things done with less waste and have the ability to adapt. But it does not say “What Types of Outcome” that this process should deliver.

What is really interesting here is when we talk about “Customer collaboration over contract negotiation“ is the end user the customer? or is it the company that employed you to develop the software the customer? If the end users are the customers then this manifesto does not make sense. If the customers are the company that employed you to develop the software, then we are only developing things that please the employer not the end user. But it is the end user’s experience that really counts, isn’t it? One of the reasons that agile ways of working work is its rapid feedback loop between the product being developed and the customers using it.

So, what can you do when your Product Manager or Product Owner wants to develop something that seems just been pulled out from the thin sky?

From an Agile Coach perspective, how can we help our client make product thinking real?

Communication and gentle guidance are key. First, it is essential for anyone who is in a coaching position to adopt the belief that everyone is just doing their best based on what they know.

With the assumption that everyone is doing their best based on what they know, there are two major aspects that we need to help our customers with; their mindset and how to do it.

Here are a few of my tried and tested approaches, and I must say, I do not implement them in sequence, but often use many of them in parallel. But most importantly, I work with Leaders, Product Designers and Specialists, Scrum Masters and Development teams to create a climate for change. So here are a few pointers:

1. Help them identify their customer basis and sectors, this includes what are the values to the customers, and what data they need to track. NB: if the organisation has a clear strategy and objectives for their product, then help the PM and POs align their thinking to these strategies and objectives. Do you know there is such a thing as a product development balanced scorecard? Watch this space for another article.
2. Point out their assumptions and hypothesis (yes, you need to learn how to spot them. Sometimes, simply asking them “how do you know that is true?” or “what has to happen to make your statement real?” would do the trick).
3. Share knowledge on the principles of Lean and Agile product development, product discovery and delivery process.
4. Encourage them to embrace experimentation and learning, get used to short learning cycles, and test with users from different user groups.
5. Enable them to understand the true value of their role. They are not project managers but the bridge between the organisation and the market. They are there to maximise the product development investment. The organisation as a whole needs to understand this.
6. Coach them on effective product backlog management: how to prioritize, balance trade-offs between value and feature, balance trade-offs between developing new work and paying down the right technical debt. There are aspects of a product that is not feature-driven, but trust driven. Like banking, health and payment products need to have the level of quality that your customer trusts. This leads to our next point.
7. Create collaboration between Product Designers and Specialists, User Researchers and Technologists to really uncover what are the values that are so important to your users, which will take a catastrophic failure for your customers to leave.

Originally published at https://nomoss.co by Sonya Yeh Spencer on February 28, 2023.