Five Best Practices For Agile Product Management
Efficiency. Collaboration. Speed. In the quest to deliver exceptional customer experiences and breakthrough innovations, many organizations are in the midst of major transformation. The transformation changes often impact teams, workflows, and technologies. Product teams are largely the ones responsible for delivering phenomenal customer experiences. And for them, a new mantra that promises to improve everything emerges: "Let’s go agile."
So, what is "agile product management," anyway? At its core, it means working in a highly responsive way so you can deliver products and updates to market quickly. But if you implement agile product management blindly, it can mean that your teams rush to market with products that are either new or that they believe are improved — without fully considering if they are delivering against their own vision or what customers actually want.
The problem is twofold. Agile management is focused on the execution and not the strategy, and it throws out the concept of delivering new functionality against fixed dates and deadlines. It suggests that both strategic thinking and working against time hinder flexibility and overall development velocity.
Yes, agile product management can inspire teams to move faster. But at the end of a development phase, teams might also look back and wonder if what was built was truly the right solution. This is not uncommon. So how do you move quickly in today's very competitive markets and still focus on delivering the most value to the business and to customers?
Based on my experience as the CEO of a product roadmap software company, I believe the answer is to move fast with a plan. Product managers do this by setting goals and building and sharing a clear product roadmap. Here are five best practices that agile product teams can follow:
Start with strategy
One of the best ways to move quickly while delivering value is to ground your work in a firm strategy — one that includes your product’s vision and goals. The vision is the core essence of your product or what you want it to achieve in the future. Your goals are more time-bound and define what you want to achieve in the next quarter or year to build toward that vision. Contrary to the beliefs of some agile aficionados, I have not found that goals will slow you down. Instead, goals can give you and the team a clear focus so you can make iterative decisions without veering off course.
Capture customer ideas
I believe your roadmap should be informed by your vision, objectives, and customers. Capture new ideas through user interviews or internal channels such as support or sales. But be careful not to iterate with every piece of feedback that comes your way. Although customers can often describe the pain they are experiencing, they may not be able to articulate the solution. Make sure you are only implementing the most valuable ideas by using an internal scoring system that uses objective metrics to rank potential features.
Define the big work
You may need broad categories for the work that will help you achieve your goals. These are your initiatives, which are also called epics and themes. Examples might include efforts like “enhance the mobile experience” or “speed up performance.” These categories can host your more tactical efforts — the individual features and user stories. By defining these categories early on, you can make sure everything you do is strategic. And if you do need to change direction, you can start by reevaluating the planned initiative. Then, define new initiatives that will better help you meet your goals.
Practice strategic prioritization
If your team cannot agree on how to prioritize competing features, then your development speed could grind to a halt. Let strategy be your guide for what you need to prioritize on your roadmap. Plan out your features in relation to your initiatives (which are tied to your goals); this is the “what” of the work. Then send it off to your development team so they can break it into technical requirements. This is the “how” of the work. You will likely end up with a backlog of features that are all tied to the strategy and a team that is clear on how each piece of work contributes to the goals. No more wondering what comes next — your team can simply pull work from the top of the prioritized list.
Work across teams
Building great products quickly requires coordination with multiple teams, including development, marketing, sales, support and design. Development will be one of the most critical teams that product managers collaborate with because developers can provide realistic estimates on how long the work will take. But every team matters. You need to be in frequent contact with everyone who impacts the product and the customer experience to ensure you are on track and are not duplicating work.
You do not need to make a choice between going fast and having a plan — great innovators and product builders can do both. The real myth of agile product management is that it is the only thing you need to build successful products. I have found that you need to be deeply grounded in strategy before you will see any benefit from moving faster.
What challenges have you seen with agile product management and development?
Originally shared on Forbes
ABOUT BRIAN AND AHA!
Brian de Haaff seeks business and wilderness adventure. He is the co-founder and CEO of Aha! — the world’s #1 product roadmap and marketing planning software — and the author of the bestselling book Lovability. His two previous startups were acquired by well-known public companies. Brian writes and speaks about product and company growth and the adventure of living a meaningful life.
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