4 common pitfalls of agile product teams

Let me know if this sounds familiar:

An executive has some customer interaction, gets a customer request, or takes an unusually thoughtful shower and gets an idea.

It’s a good idea.

You run the business case, it looks like you can probably build it for a little and sell it for a lot.

So you send the idea to design, who mocks it up and sends it to product/engineering.

Engineering has a meeting where they break out the designs into bite-sized tasks. They throw them into a backlog.

The team gets together, weighs the tasks, prioritizes a sprint, and off we go.

A few sprints go by.?

We review what’s going right, what’s going wrong. Maybe we shuffle some tasks around, we’re agile motherf*****!

After a handful of deploys we have some semblance of the idea out in the wild.

You slap some analytics on it.

Onto the next idea…

That might sound like agile development but it’s not. It’s agile delivery. And it’s bad.

You shipped a new feature or project but you can't be sure if it's innovative. How could you? You just shipped it to the customer after weeks or months of work.

There's a slight chance this really was a good idea, but there's a better chance it wasn't. There's a good chance that this feature gets scrapped in a later release.

The reality is, this top-down development process stifles innovation.

Here’s why:

Executives and sales teams are not the best source of ideas*

Before my fellow execs and sales folks rage quit this post, hear me out. I put the * there because we are not the best source of ideas but we are the best source for identifying customer’s problems. Sales and support teams interact with customers more than anyone, so they're often the first to hear about problems the product could solve.

Executives (especially the non-technical kind) are not technology experts. They aren’t UX experts. They don’t understand how things work in detail. And they shouldn’t! It’s not their job. Their job is to communicate, sell, and grow a vision.

But it’s easy for these persuasive leaders to fall in love with ideas. Because they *know* they can sell them. That’s what they’re good at. This is a slippery slope. This leads to ideas at the top being developed at the bottom.

We’re treating business cases like they’re anything other than science fiction

I’m the first person to suggest running the numbers. It’s a great first-step to filtering our good ideas from wastes of time. But it’s an ineffective way of prioritizing development work.

The truth is, we can’t know how much something costs to build until engineering scopes the solution. And we can't know how much we can sell it for until we've verified our customers are willing to make the investment.

The solution experts had no part in the solution

If you tell a good designer to design your idea they will do so 10X better than you could've dreamed.

But here's the thing: that’s not design, that’s turning chicken shit into chicken salad.

If the purpose of a designer was to optimize ideas they would be called analysts. Designers design solutions.

To effectively design a solution, design needs a thoughtful, detailed problem. Then they should work side by side with engineering to develop the best solution. Then design what that might look like. The only way to do that is to start with the problem.

All the risk is at the end

If you develop this way, you’re placing all the risk at the end. Two reasons:

1. In top-down development, engineering gets involved in solutions last. You're paying for technical expertise without putting it to work. What a colossal waste of resources. I’m not a developer but I have hired a few. When you factor in the salaries, benefits, stock options, on-demand coffee subscriptions, and the office beer tap, those folks get expensive.
2. When you don’t validate if a problem is worth solving, customers don't use the solution. And the work gets cut.

?When work gets cut, talent leaves

The idea strategy can work sometimes, but only if you're lucky. The best teams don't leave their success up to luck.

That strategy will lead to more hard work being cut than kept.

And when that happens, your best talent feels like they're wasting their time, and they leave.

I can joke about how expensive engineers and designers are all day. But once you get past the ever-inflating salaries, the best people all just want one thing.

It’s the same thing you want.

To build useful products that people love.

More on how to do that…

This post is one of a series of posts from the playbook on product strategy I’ve compiled over the past 7 years.

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