A Quick Dip into our new book – Discover to Deliver: Agile Product Planning & Analysis

by Ellen Gottesdiener and Mary Gorman

How do you rapidly discover product needs and create a practical plan for delivering high-value products? How do the people on your product development team collaborate as partners to explore and evaluate which work to deliver next? How do you confirm that you’re building the right product in the first place? How do you incorporate Agile/Lean practices into your daily work?

Our newly released book, Discover to Deliver: Agile Product Planning and Analysis (two years in the writing) addresses these tough questions.

Here’s a quick tour of the big concepts.

Discover to Deliver™ Big Concepts

Discover to Deliver gives you a framework for collaboratively delivering high-value products. D2D (our nickname for the book) is a toolkit of practices that helps you evolve your product though the ongoing, interwoven activities of product development.

Product

At any given moment, the product you’re working on is the sum of the decisions the team makes during their discovery and delivery work. Product needs, or requirements, are product options that await action in your backlog. In Agile/Lean, the key is for all the stakeholders to gain a shared, holistic understanding of the product’s options based on clear and transparent assessment of their value and the predefined product vision.

Structured Conversations and Value

The structured conversation is a metaphor we’ve described for several years and use with our Agile/Lean clients. It’s a systematic, collaborative and efficient way to explore, evaluate, and confirm your product’s options.

The structured conversation entails three essential parts: you explore the product options, evaluate the options using value considerations, and confirm the selected options to verify they are delivered correctly and validate they are delivering the anticipated value.

Value considerations need to be transparent and aligned to your product vision and goals. Value can change with time, customer demand, and emerging technologies. So you assess value continually and explicitly.

The Partners and the Planning Views

The structured conversation engages three stakeholder groups: the business people, the technology people, and the customers. As product partners they explore, evaluate, and confirm various product options. As each group may have differing perspectives of the product options’ value, the structured conversation enables them to learn from each other and collectively reach agreement on the highest value.

The structured conversation is framed by what we call planning views: the Big-View, the Pre-View, and the Now-View. Being constantly focused on the current planning view keeps the team on target as you analyze and plan product’s options.

A Big-View structured conversation discovers the longer-term, abstract options for your product, outlined in a product portfolio. In a Pre-View structured conversation you discover and prepare more concrete product options needed for the next release. And in a Now-View structured conversation you prepare the product options in sufficient detail for delivery in your next (or current) iteration or delivery cycle.

The 7 Product Dimensions

To ensure a holistic, comprehensive understanding of product needs, the partners’ conversation is guided by the 7 Product Dimensions: User, Interface, Action, Data, Control, Environment, and Quality Attribute. You explore, evaluate and confirm each of the 7 Product Dimensions, individually and collectively.

The 7 Product Dimensions take your team beyond simply writing user stories. Instead, the 7 Product Dimensions guide you in thinking holistically about meeting stakeholders’ actual needs and—dare we say it—even delighting them.

Continuing the Conversation

Discover to Deliver gives you essential practices you can quickly adopt to continually discover your evolving product. Its practical guidance helps you take the lead in ensuring your team can successfully collaborate to deliver a high-valued product.

Have questions about these concepts? Want to learn more? Check out the D2D book’s website: www.DiscoverToDeliver.com