Scrum Product Development Vs Traditional Product Development

Based on my experience in the scrum and other prominent experts, today I will be talking about why scrum product development is more effective, reliable, efficient, speedy and better compare to traditional product development to manage products & services that are more customer-centric in nature.

Roman Pichler in his book clearly advocates agile product management practices. He shares his thoughts on old school & new school product management by differentiating based on roles played, activities to be performed, team relationship etc.

To KISS (Keep It Short & Sweet), I will elaborate benefits of Agile Product Development using Scrum from the perspective of different players of the game.

Benefits from the Stakeholder’s Perspective:

• Waiting time to see demo is reduced
• Demo enables stakeholders to see whether the team has developed the product as per the requirements or not, based on it they can give go / no-go decision for the launch. As scrum talks about 2 or 4 weeks of a development cycle, it becomes quicker to see the demo of the minimal viable product in short time instead of seeing it after 6 or 8 months. This also helps fail fast theory.
• Change of plan with respect to customer behaviour & technology advancements
• As the market has become more and more dynamic in nature due to the introduction of new technologies every 3 months, business strategy has to be rechecked every 3 months to keep up with the trend of the market and customer behavioural change. Scrum helps to incorporate change of requirements in a quick manner so that business can change their priorities to match their speed with technological advancements.

Benefits from the Development Team’s (Engineers & QA) perspective:

• Openness and Trust
• No supervision and freedom mean more work gets done. Scrum allows the development team to be self-organized and make own commitments to complete the work. The team is involved in Product Roadmap discussion and Release Planning which gives them wonderful perspective of what is coming their way and allows them to see long term vision instead of just completing given task at hand. Later when requirements come in the format of user stories, the team estimates and gives commitments based on their understanding because they would be working on it.
• Collaborating more instead working in Silo
• Project Manager does not manage the team but team manages the development by themselves and works in more collaborative fashion. Scrum does not promote titles of Testers and Developers to avoid conflicts and calls them Engineers. Everyone is an engineer in the team to complete the committed (and not ordered) task.

Benefits from the Product Manager’s (Product Owner) perspective:

• Focus will be on user or customer experience of the product & services
• Being Strategic Product Manager one needs to always concentrate on user needs and user experience of the product to deliver delight through continuous innovation. Pinkesh Shah promotes Productizing Process at Adaptive Marketing and Institute of Product Leadership to give more emphasises on value management to delight users by every possible way. Scrum removes the blockers from Product Manager to concentrate more on user experience and adapt to change of requirements in quick fashion.
• Change Management becomes easy
• As the team is involved at various levels and understands why certain things have to change due to change in market directions & business strategies, it becomes easy for the product manager to convey the message of change to the development team. Product Owner keeps product roadmap and product backlog updated so that team can discuss it every 2 weeks during sprint planning. Mike Cohn has explained in his article how someone can get maximum value out of backlog grooming and who should attend.

Benefits from the Project Manager’s (Scrum Master) perspective:

• Scrum Ceremonies are designed to increase transparency and collaboration
• Scrum asks to perform various ceremonies like Release Planning, Sprint Planning, Daily Stand-ups, Demo & Retrospective. Due to this scrum master concentrates on anchoring the ship by maintaining impediments backlog and removing roadblocks instead of managing and running the ship.

Scrum process is represented graphically at the following link:

Source: https://eternalsunshineoftheismind.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/scrum_process_big.jpg

In a conclusion, scrum allows companies to have iterative and incremental product development so that they can cater to customer needs faster and more precisely considering the change in customer/user behaviour due to rapid technological advancement around the targeted segments.