Working product over comprehensive documentation

The second statement of the Agile Manifesto goes hand in hand with the startup culture. Just like startups are always more focused on making a product and delivering it to the customers, the statement says that Working Product should be prioritised over Comprehensive Documentation.

Documentation is and will be a very critical part of any organisation. As people can move, Documents stay. But, there should be a limit to how much Documentation should be done. The more the merrier doesn't work here. In the last few decades, many organisations have grown to an unprecedented scale. And with this, the criticality of documentation has increased manifolds. Simultaneously, the impact of documentation on overall productivity has also increased, but in a bad way. There are numerous examples where teams were unable to build products due to more time being taken up by documentation tasks. On top of it, there is no clear line to define how much documentation is good, and after what stage of documentation starts hindering the progress. However, It is widely accepted that documentation adds value only up to a specific point, after which it will start adding less value and taking more time.

Working Product on the other hand is something which should always be the primary priority for all teams. Product is what makes all activities tangible, what gives meaning to any organisation. With this line of thought it makes perfect sense to prioritise working product over comprehensive documentation. Let's take an example in a different line of thought just for the sake of discussion: Assume you are an automotive startup, building a vehicle for the masses. Not doing comprehensive documentation here can lead to the vehicle not being deemed to be safe by the authorities. This means that you have a working product, but you cannot take it to your customers due to regulations. This is just one of the many examples which will justify the need for comprehensive documentation.

Agile Manifesto clearly prioritises working products over comprehensive documentation. But it also says that both of these are critical. I have discussed why these both are critical, but why should we prioritise one over the other? One way of looking at this is that there can be no documentation without a product. Documentation is a by-product of a product and hence should always be treated as secondary. Another way of looking at this is that Product is what gives meaning to an organisation, documentation on the other hand helps in transmitting that meaning to everyone and keeps the organisation sustainable. (And of course, before aiming for sustainability, there should be a product which has to be sustained)

The way I look at this is that there is a balance between Documentation and Product. And, it is the responsibility of a Project Manager to keep everything balanced. This balance completely depends on the weights being given to Product and Documentation. And the weights keep changing from project to project, from time to time.