“A large, global financial service firm (we’ll call it BigFin) was three years into its journey to adopt agile ways of working. To accelerate customer experience improvements that had already been achieved, the technology infrastructure division decided to align its structure and delivery to become product-centric. The focus was primarily on products used internally by its employees.
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This essay is part of the book 97 Things Every Scrum Practitioner Should Know, by Gunther Verheyen (editor)
Alice, wandering in Wonderland, said it best. “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” This certainly applies to software development teams. Even some of the best Scrum teams can’t answer the simple question, “What is your product?”
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In my recent Modern Agile Show interview with Joshua Kerievsky, we discussed product management in an agile context, product discovery and delivery, collaboration, and more.
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Product managers can make better decisions if they’ve built transparency and trust with their team. How these decisions are made is also important, and it requires a clear and collaborative process. Here’s a straightforward framework for collaborative decision making that is founded in transparency and trust.
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In the podcast, I discuss infusing product management with agile principles and practices. Lesley Morse, the podcast interviewer, summarized the highlights of our conversation as follows:
“Ellen speculates a future where there will be a “blending of disciplines where you don’t necessarily have a business area and a technology area”, just one product team with interdisciplinary team members. Her piece of advice to product people: Have strategic awareness of your product in the marketplace or “Big-View”, and get rid of junk in the backlog.
Gottesdiener also takes us down the memory lane to the beginnings of the Agile Conference – she has attended every one of them since Salt Lake City. She reminds us of the women who have had a large impact on the Agile community from the very beginning.”
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“So, what is your product?” That was the key question I posed in my Agile Cincinnati keynote recently.
In my product coaching work, I have come to realize that many organizations don’t have a clear and consistent answer to this fundamental question. This has serious consequences. A poorly defined product impacts your ability to respond to changing customer and market needs. It results in less than satisfying product outcomes. It causes organizational and communication woes. It thwarts organizations efforts to scale agile product development.
Everyone in your product development ecosystem should have a shared, consistent, and coherent answer to the fundamental question, “What is your product?”
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The Product Canvas can help address a number of challenges as you transition to a product-centric organization. You may want to take a step back to rethink your product strategy. Perhaps you realize you’re not organized for optimal product development and need to redesign your organization so its structure follows product. Or maybe you need to improve your product management practices.
For all these scenarios, defining your product is your starting point.
The Product Canvas has two parts. In my last blog, “Using the Product Canvas to Define Your Product: Getting Started”, you learned about the strategic and positioning benefits of the Product Canvas Part 1. Product Canvas Part 2, the subject of this blog, helps you define the essence of your product by defining its compositional requirements.
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I usually find a diversity of opinion when I ask anyone within an organization what their products are. This is true for product companies whose primary source of revenue is their product and for companies who use products internally to run their business.
This comes from a lack of shared understanding.
Not having agreement on “what is our product” is particularly problematic in large enterprises that have built complex organizational structures. It also surfaces in organizations attempting to modernize their product development practices. Many organizations recognize the need to take an outside-in approach to their business in order to focus on their customers. Even when organizations shift from project thinking and embrace product thinking, the problem remains the same. We don’t agree on what our products are and what our products are not.
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In my product coaching work, I often find product people (Product Managers and Product Owners) struggling to do too much. It can be exhausting to attempt to do everything rather than focus on doing only the right things.
There needs to be a way to show how a product development team supports product folks and how they can lean on their development team while providing them with appropriate product leadership.
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Have you experienced working with a great product development team? Key characteristics of a great team I’ve witnessed include clear product outcomes understood by everyone, outstanding product leadership, regular customer engagement, and continuous product discovery and delivery cycles. While achieving outcomes with joy and purpose, a great team also enhances its own skills and knowledge.
Agile product teams rely on each other’s skills and knowledge to achieve shared outcomes. Together, a great team continually adjusts what and how they are working together.
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