How Agile Has Changed Product Management
As the Manifesto for Agile Software Development celebrates its 20th anniversary, I take a look at how agile practices have influenced and changed product management. I discuss the benefits that have been achieved and the challenges that still remain.
You can also listen to the audio version of this article and watch the video below:
Once Upon a Time in Waterfall Land
Before the advent of agile frameworks like Scrum, a product person — the product manager — would typically carry out the market research, compile a market requirements specification, create a business case, put together product roadmap, write a requirements specification, and then hand it off to a project manager. The latter would work with one or more development teams to get the specification implemented.
During the development phase, the product manager would be only loosely involved, typically attending a project steering meeting and possibly issuing change requests. Otherwise, the individual would hope that the requirements were implemented as specified. Only once the product was close to being finished would the product manager return to the project and prepare the release of the product.
This sequential, waterfall-based approach used to work when there was little change and innovation, when product managers could correctly predict what the users needed and describe the detailed product functionality upfront. But it is less suited to create complex digital products.
The Brave New Agile World
As agile practices have become more widely adopted, the processes used to develop products have significantly changed: Product people and development teams now tend to collaborate much more closely. Dev teams have become cross-functional consisting of UX designers, architects, programmers, testers, and other roles. Products are developed using iterative-incremental processes like Scrum. Requirements are no longer detailed and frozen before development starts but they emerge. An increasing number of organisations have moved away from organising around projects and have started to embrace a product-led approach.
Early user feedback, frequent solution validation: We now have the ability to collect early and frequent user and customer feedback, which helps us validate our ideas and update our plans accordingly. This has increased the chances of creating a product with the right UX and the right features.
Reduced time-to-market: We can now release new products and features more quickly. This is enabled by a closer, ongoing collaboration with cross-functional development teams, shifting from written documentation to face-to-face conversations, and using techniques such as user stories that reduce overhead — when applied correctly.
Better product quality and improved adaptability: The quality of our products has improved through the application of agile development practices like emergent design, test-driven development, and continuous integration. This has allowed us to adapt the product more quickly and to respond to user feedback more easily.
Better requirements: As product people, we are no longer solely responsible for coming up with the correct requirements. Instead, the dev team members actively participate in the product backlog refinement work and help us identify the necessary changes and capture new product backlog items. This leverages the team members’ creativity and expertise, creates a shared understanding, fosters collective ownership, improves the quality of the requirements, and ultimately results in better products.
Transparent development progress: We can see the development progress more clearly and make corrections early if required: The progress is now based on working software rather than a detailed, Gantt chart-based project plan. This mitigates the risk of discovering late that the product cannot be shipped on time or that some features were implemented incorrectly.
Improved alignment: Stakeholders and development teams are now better aligned through the use of regular collaborative workshops like sprint reviews. This creates a shared understanding and leads to greater commitment: Asking people about their perspectives and involving them in the process of making product decisions increases the likelihood that the individuals will support the decisions.
Motivated productive teams: Last but not least, self-organising development teams tend to be more motivated and productive compared to traditional ones, as they are able to determine themselves how much work can be done in a given period, decide who carries out a specific piece of work, and agree on how the team members collaborate.
Read On …
To read the rest of this article and access the remaining tips, please head over to my website: https://www.romanpichler.com/blog/how-agile-has-changed-product-management/
Learn More
You can learn more about effectively using agile product management practices by attending my Product Owner Masterclass and reading my book Agile Product Management with Scrum.
Source: https://www.romanpichler.com/blog/how-agile-has-changed-product-management/
