The S-curves of Dual-Track Agile - Product Thoughts #131

A lot has been said about the idea of comparing discovering and building new products with pushing "stuff" up a hill, beyond a tip of "uncertainty" and walking downhill from there on. Ryan Singer has coined the most fitting visualization at Basecamp in the form of the Hill Chart.

And while I agree with the idea of the primary process of "figuring it out" (aka Product Discovery) is about tackling uncertainty (mainly through collecting qualitative and quantitative evidence), I don't agree with the way it is communicating of how discovery and delivery play together.

Coming from a recent discussion about implementing Dual Track Agile in one of my Product Discovery Workshops, I believe that the idea of S-curves could be more appropriate here. Typically, S-curves are mainly used to describe the rise, peaking, and saturation of broad market trends.

But as with these innovation trends, the act of Product Discovery and Product Delivery also lets product team members experience the intensity of every phase to different degrees over time.

Discovery and Delivery are alternating S-Curves. As you approach a certain saturation or peak, you want to pick up the next curve (delivery) and the next curve (next discovery) and so on. For all team members, the intensity of both phases has ebbs and flows.

This visualization can also help teams (which are new to the idea of operating on two tracks) to understand how the two phases play to feed into each other (on a general level) and how one discovery might influence the next one, and that discovery and delivery don't follow, etc.

My issue with the most common visualization is that it oversimplifies things and leaves teams hanging up in the air when it comes to getting started with synchronizing their tracks.

This is a super rough and first take on this. What do you think of this idea and the visualization? Does it help you to grasp the specific of Dual-Track Agile? Let me know if you'd like to see some refined writing on this topic by replying to the e-mail.

Have a great week and take care,

Tim

What I read last week

How 51 leading tech teams define the Product Manager role

We analyzed 51 job postings from tech companies in Silicon Valley. Companies ranged from small startups (1-50 employees) to the larger one (10,000+ employees) like Uber, Visa, and Amazon. Of the 51 Product Manager positions we analyzed, 33 of the openings were labeled as Product Manager roles and 18 of them were Senior Product Manager roles. Here’s what we learned.

Clarity with a single OKR

If you’ve had your strategy for some time now, you’ve almost certainly communicated it to employees many times via various different channels. So how the heck can they not know about it, let alone understand it? Why, despite your efforts, do you see so little progress on this front? Various studies4 suggest that unclear direction and lack of purpose are often major culprits. Worker performance tends to improve when the employer commits to a single strategic goal. Moreover, when each employee is set specific, relatively demanding goals they become more committed to achieving them5.

How Asking Works: A Crash Course in Customer Discovery Questions

A customer discovery interview is a sea voyage for which there is no map. At any moment, we may crash into an awkward pause, be devoured by a bias lurking just beneath the surface, or sail in the wrong direction entirely, thinking it’s the right one, and wash ashore on the Island of Wasted Time.

Design partnership with users

Imagine that you work for a company that creates lawnmowers. Now imagine that you are tasked with the design of a new, specialized lawnmower, but you have always lived in the city and have never used any kind of large landscaping tools. The only grass you have exposure to is at the park. How can you design a delightful experience for your users if you haven’t shared their perspective and don’t really understand what they need?

What’s in the DNA of Product People?

As Marty Cagan remarks on this pressure in his book Inspired: “The product manager position is not a 9‐to‐5 job. … I don’t think I’m doing you any favors by misleading you. The level of time and effort required by the product manager role is extremely tough to sustain if you’re not personally passionate about your products and your role.”

Why sales and marketing are the key to your roadmap success

Product managers have the onus to be deeply attentive listeners. We’ve got to keep a pulse on a diverse set of inputs, filtering signals amidst the noise, to build strategic direction and seemingly mid-flight, make calculated tradeoffs for the product roadmap.

A Piece of the Pie

Product development organizations used the increasing headcounts to form ever more specialized teams, with ever more specialized product managers — teams focused on product areas like newsfeed and search, on platforms like iOS and Android, or on strategic themes like personalization and onboarding. This change towards multiple autonomous teams was needed to keep up with rapid market developments, growing numbers of stakeholders, and to help us stay sane in times of fast growth. While this specialization surely helped to prevent burnout, it also reduced the influence over the bigger picture and with that the ability to influence the overall product. This is not only about product management growing up as a discipline. This is as much about us product people who need to be equally mature when it comes to approaching our craft.

Outcomes Over Output is Product Management

Agile is commonly touted as a cure-all for business problems, but people often misapply it. According to Josh, people mistakenly think that agile means that they can request a list of features and an agile team will deliver them quickly. For agile to be successful, however, it needs to be a cross-disciplinary way of working where the team’s not a delivery team, but rather a problem-solving team whose goal is to achieve a business outcome or solve a customer problem.

Just Keep Shipping

Shipping looks a little different than it did when I was building a product. Each week I record and ship a podcast. I’ve begun writing about whatever I happen to be pondering and publishing at least once a week. But shipping doesn’t have to be as concrete as building features, publishing articles, or dropping podcast episodes – it can merely be delivering value to others in some form.

The Three Steps of Continuous Customer Obsession

You’ve got to maintain product and platform momentum over time. But how? And what are some realistic expectations? Hiten Shah discusses how product marketers and teams need to empathize with the customer’s needs in order to continually iterate on the user experience, validate inbound channels, fix onboarding, and improve processes and platform engagement strategies over time.

Product Thoughts is a weekly newsletter/digest I send out to over a thousand leaders in product, UX, and business every week. To learn more about previous editions and sign up for it, go to herbig.co/newsletter.