The value of Agile Product Discovery

A typical result of a project failing is not delivering on what the client or customer really needed at the end of the project. To further exasperate the issue, clients and customers often find it hard to define their needs accurately. They often dont know exactly what they want at the start of the project. As project teams, we can be guilty of not raising our hands when the vision and requirements are unclear, yet we get going anyway. The result looks a lot like this.

So what can you do to avoid this scenario?

What is Collaborative Product Discovery (CPD)?

Roman Pichler puts it best, when he says, Product Discovery is a team sport . Gaining active participation from stakeholders and a cross functional team at the initial stages of project/product discovery enables you to utilise their knowledge and expertise, build rapport, align the product vision, and create support for product decisions.

How CPD works:

1. Create an open and safe environment for the agile team and stakeholders by ensuring that all ideas, concerns and points of view are heard and discussed.
2. Define the product vision by answering the following questions - Why are we creating this product? What are the goals for this product? How will we measure and evaluate success? There are great tools available online that can assist with this such as the Product Canvas. There are also free resources available on Roman Pichler's website .
3. Promote the usability of features and details from a customer's point of view i.e., try and live the user experience - who are the typical users of the site? What are their different needs? What do we want them to do? what functionality is required? What is the user journey? What is the empathy map?
4. Define the content - What are the different data types we need to support? Why are they needed? What will they achieve?
5. Define the technical environment - What security restrictions are there? What interfaces are required? What development framework do we need to use?

AN EXAMPLE OF A PRODUCT DISCOVERY BOARD

How can Collaborative Product Discovery CPD be valuable to a Project?

Benefits CPD provides:

1. Creates a common vision for the product between the client, product owner(s) and team.
2. Establishes a common understanding of MVP (minimum viable product) requirements between the client, product owner(s) and team.        
3. Creates a list of prioritized features (or backlog) for the product.
4. Estimates the amount of work required to create an MVP.
5. Plans work for the next iterations.

An example of how CPD worked in a client situation

Situation: In 2015 a situation occured in an Australian government finance entity, where multiple business departments requested an updated internal security and access model for their client portal and CRM systems. The updated model was required because multiple state owned entities had amalgamated their investment management businesses. The business departments handed over responsibility to the scrum teams and requested a product roadmap and estimates for the security and access model updates. They believed the scope was pretty much fixed and clearly understood by all. After a week of investigation and research, the scrum teams were not comfortable in providing any plans, estimates, or specifications because of large amounts of open questions and inconsistencies in requirements. 

Action: We actioned this situation by initiating a CPD workshop to align the vision between the different departments, remove assumptions, define requirements, then priotitize and estimate the work. Prior to running the workshop, the stakeholders were under the assumption that all staff fell into 1 of 2 buckets (Investment Management and non Investment Management). Consideration had not been given to operations staff, client relationship managers, economists, support staff, etc. These staff members were required to have access to both sets of data in some cases.

Resolution: Initiating a CPD workshop brought about a resolution to the issue, whereby at the end of the workshop, the team:

1. Shared a common understanding of the vision and requirements.
2. Understood the technical complexities.
3. Re-evaluated their timeline expectations.
4. Defined an MVP.
5. Understood the value of agile (some stakeholders were new to Agile).

Conclusion

To conclude, creating a shared vision and common understanding of requirements through a CPD workshop will benefit your project by:

1. Driving agile values and culture at the beginning of the project.
2. Assisting a well defined and prioritized backlog with clearer missions and goals.
3. Assisting the estimation of work required to deliver the MVP.
4. Improving confidence and collaboration between the often siloed business and engineering teams .
5. Conducting future product discovery with more confidence.

Want to know more? Contact me on linkedin or at [email protected].

Thanks for reading.