Weekend Reading – Product Decisions Come First!

Dear all,

hope your weekend has been as sunny as ours!

While walking Moritz, our dog, in the snow (we do already have quite a bit of snow up here in the valleys!) yesterday, I came to the conclusion that we often think product development backwards.

An example: Recently I had a conversation with a newly minted head of a product management department. One of his key concerns was „… to decide which scaling agile development methods should be permissible in their company.“

At the same time, his team had not even laid out the product visions for most of their products…

Let’s be blunt: product success is not about methods. There is no „Just add water, a Scrum Master, and stir until well-blended!“ -approach to creating the agile organisations and working models that will reliably and predictably deliver winning products.

Products need to be actively driven to achieve customer outcomes; applying and continuously adapting elements from many schools of thought to get there. See the above graphics that I borrowed from John Cutler’s (2017) tweet.

As already quoted: „Product decisions come first – all other decisions follow.“

Agile, though, will undoubtedly be an element of executing these decisions. Tesla’s success for example is widely attributed to extending an agile mindset beyond creating- to also manufacturing their products. Mind you, not a particular Agile “method” like e.g. Scrum or SAFe, but rather the mindset!

For that reason I have added a brief post about the key concepts of Modern Agile to the reads for the weekend:

Modern Agile — an introduction to an awesome concept

Agile has gone down a rathole by being confounded with Scrum. „Modern Agile“ blends well with a product-driven approach. Intro courtesy of Jan-Willem Ageling
Click to view!

Enjoy your Sunday evening!

Cheers,
Godehard