Agile Fundamentals - The Empowerment of Small Teams

I’ve been a long-time student of processes and tools for product development. I was first introduced to agile 7 years ago and was immediately attracted to several of the core principles. I've come to appreciate how agile frameworks attempt to institutionalize several of what I consider the most important traits of the best product teams: customer focus and then close collaboration to solve a problem together. Agile is fundamentally about getting people to talk to each other.

While there’s lots of rituals around almost any process, the essence of any Agile framework, from my perspective as it pertains to product teams, is really around the following two notions:

• Steady, incremental releases (the more frequent the better) - better for us, and better for customers; test and release automation really facilitates this
• A small team empowered to find and solve a problem - as opposed to stakeholders issuing a PM a very specific list of desired features, and the PM then explicitly assigning and tracking tasks, shepherding the release from start to finish

While the first change has represented a significant difference to how software was actually produced and released, the second change was more about how teams actually work and solve problems, and who takes responsibility for the outcome.

Incremental release is a technical struggle that's perhaps more easily overcome. Empowering a dedicated product team faces political challenges within organizations as stakeholders as reluctant to handover responsibility, especially when they have a rebranded but ill-equipped "product owner" who is more about the processes and backlog than the deep knowledge of customers, data, and the business. I've learned this from experience!

Whenever senior stakeholders are feeding down their own roadmaps, the product teams, whether they are following agile processes or not, are not really empowered.