Beyond the Hype: 10 Realities of Agile Working You Need to Know

The Uncomfortable Truth About Agile: 10 Lessons for #productmanager which are essential to factor in their day to day work.

1. Estimates are not deadlines.

An estimate provided is based on the knowledge, context and priorities at that time.

Your team is often working with unknowns, complexity, dependencies a plenty. Build a minimum viable governance that enables you to learn & communicate expectations accordingly,

Don't hold people to arbitrary deadlines.

2. Customers don't care if you're agile, waterfall or otherwise.

They care about their experience & evaluate if your product helps them or not. Focus on the quality and frequency of your interactions with customers.

3. Telling people they have psychological safety isn't enough

You need to demonstrate that people are ok to fail through action, not just words. Celebrate failure, be intentional about creating a safe environment.

4. Adopting AGILE won't solve all of your problems.

Agile isn't a fool proof mechanism. It'll just expose your problems quicker. The core of Agility is that it builds in feedback loops. It's up to you to learn from them and adjust from there.

5. An agile transformation is never complete.

A transformation means a butterfly emerges out from cocoon.

Agility is more evolutionary than transformation. A continuous evolution of ways of working based on changes within your context. Take a printout of this phrase " CHANGE is the only constant " and keep following it every day.

6. Learning & innovation requires free capacity

If you are turning your team into a feature factory, without enabling the time and space for people to learn and innovate, people will find another job that enables them to learn and innovate elsewhere.

Its important to plan for 6hrs in a day and let some time for people to breathe during the work day.

7. Twice the work in half the time has done more harm than good.

Every executive would love to hear "We increased the output by 50% using the same set of resources" It means earlier planning was bad or you are setting unrealistic expectations for the senior management.

If there is resource crunch, voice it out as early as possible.

8. It's the system at fault, not the people.

Remember, things are not failing just because of people in it ; the system, process are setup for failure. Retrospect at scale regularly, learn what's getting in the way of your people and then get out of their way.

9. Treat people like resources & they will behave that way

Respect is mutual in any setup. At the end of the day, you are dealing with humans. Asking them to stretch on weekends, join for few hours on a planned leave day etc shows that leadership does not care for team members.

So many companies profess that their people are their most important asset but then treat them like machines. Humans are more than just avatars on a screen, we are beating hearts behind our devices.

It's a self fulfilling prophecy. If you focus solely on productivity, people will behave like resources. Nobody wants to feel like a JIRA ticket machine.

10. If you want change, YOU have to change.

You have to be willing to role model the change you want to see yourself. Be vulnerable and make the change first. Admit that you don't have all the answers & that you'll discover them together.

What would you add?