Freedom to flex:
Why true agility means letting product teams off the leash

To keep teams focused on business outcomes, lines of ownership must be clear. At all stages, the product manager decides what the team is delivering, while the team focuses on how they will deliver it. “A product manager is the CEO of their product,” White explains. “They need to understand their teams and, moreover, the business stakeholders they’re trying to serve.” 

Forrester Research agrees. Clear lines of ownership are essential for scaling Agile practices, its research says, and businesses have more success when “they identify and empower business-led product ownership”. 

Sometimes, though, product managers can be distracted from business outcomes by measures of productivity, such as throughput or velocity. Resolving this requires a renewed commitment to what is perhaps Agile’s most important value for businesses – and the one that is most likely to determine the success of innovation efforts: customer collaboration. 

For Ben Pitman, director of engineering at Kin + Carta, organisations who want to deliver successful innovation at the speed that meets demand must never shift their focus away from customer needs. The best way to start out on this user-focused journey, he suggests, is to begin with fast and cheap customer- focused experiments. “When you have an idea, you start by validating it quickly with a conversation,” says Pitman. “You can go on to further de-risk by conducting more expensive experiments, like A/B testing, proportional to the cost of getting it wrong.” 

Keeping customers in the loop throughout the development process reduces the risk that resources are sunk into an idea that offers no tangible business value, Pitman explains. 

“There’s no point in knowing your customer better if your organisation can’t adapt to this information,” he says. “Put the user testing into the same small squad as your engineers, your product manager – give them clear goals and watch them succeed.”

Rapid innovation

When Gordon Food Service, a distributor operating in the US and Canada, felt pressure from competitors to upgrade its e-commerce offering, it wanted to move fast. The company adopted a continuous integration/continuous delivery model for application development and built its new ordering app on Google’s Kubernetes Engine, allowing for rapid delivery of new functionality. 

Crucial to the success of the project, however, was a customer-driven development methodology, developed in partnership with Kin + Carta. This combined Scrum, the Agile project management framework, with elements of Extreme Programming (XP), including pair programming, in which two software developers collaborate closely, writing and testing code in rapid iterations. 

Combining this rapid approach to software development with frequent feedback from customers allowed the company to quickly build e-commerce features that its customers truly valued. 

This year, organisations’ capacity to innovate will be put to the test. Those companies that have trapped their developers in rigid processes and rituals are limiting their own ability to adapt. Getting back to Agile’s values can help liberate their potential.

Upshot 

■ Go back to Agile’s principles and values – don’t blindly follow the frameworks. The end goal is to serve customer needs by empowering your experts to work independently and learn from their success. 

■ Product managers must work within and across teams – ownership of products must be organised to progress towards a coherent product or service, and teams must communicate throughout. 

■ Listen to customers, not formulas – talk to customers and make sure what is being proposed will solve a need. Meeting this need will ultimately deliver value to the business.