Agile Pain Point: Product Debt

A scribble with the word Product Debt

What's Product Debt?

Product Debt is the culmination of competing business needs, functionality requests, hastily made design decisions, quick fixes, wonky workarounds, and then some –  that has led to a feature-crowded, possibly clunky, and oftentimes not very usable product.

You’ve heard it before, agile product delivery is a balancing act between building the right thing, building the thing right, and building the thing fast. Product Debt mainly happens while you’re trying to build the right thing.  How do you choose which features and feedback to incorporate with constant feedback and input from your stakeholders and customers? How do you prioritize requests? Or how do you make one person happy while knowing someone else won’t be?

Design with the end in mind.

Become a product and service-focused “machine.” Understand the problem (or need) you’re trying to solve and have a strong vision for your product solution strategy, both internal and external. This is how you do it:

 The business articulates its needs

• Stakeholders prioritize those needs through support and funding

• Product Owners create and drive the product vision and ensure alignment of delivery

• Business needs and product strategy are visualized and communicated through the roadmap, and

• The Product backlog visualizes the decomposition of the roadmap into traceable, digestible pieces of work.

Through the balance of customer collaboration, rolling wave planning, and transparent delivery practices, your product direction, prioritization, and delivery strategy will be to the benefit of everyone because everyone was a part of the process. And everyone will be on the same page and know where they’re headed.

SIDE NOTE: To build the roadmap, you absolutely must have input from business experts, technical experts, process experts, and the people doing the work. You won’t have an accurate projection of what is possible if any representative is missing . You might aim high but not have the tech foundation to back it up. Or, you may set out to build a high-tech product, but it’s not what your customer wants or needs. Every one of those voices working together to represent and balance their interests is vital when deciding on the ultimate goal. It takes a village – and an agile coach!

Intentional Problem Solving

With a strong vision and product solution strategy, you can make decisions with intent.  The Product Owner will make sure teams are building the right thing. Not at the mercy of fire drills and random requests. Responsiveness to the business and technology is needed but should not always be the driving force.

here will always be a constant tension between building the right thing, building the thing right, and building the thing fast. Releasing the tension in any of the three areas will be a decision you’ll have to pay for later. Robbing Peter to pay Paul, so to speak, leads to possible product debt. Or tech debt, or time debt, but that’s another blog. Maybe you’re short on funding or time and need something fast. Building a quick and dirty prototype is perfectly acceptable.  It’s another story if you’re building an enterprise solution.  Each decision is a tradeoff that needs to be made with intent and with a complete understanding of the consequences. This brings me back to the beginning….

Decide what’s important to your customer, execute on your strategy, and build with the end in mind.

You don’t have to go it alone! Let us help!

 

Darren Hoevel, President, Leadership & Agile Coach

By: Darren Hoevel

I’m Sick of the Word “Transformation”

Boot stepping on a butterfly
Boot stepping on a butterfly

I’m sick of the word transformation.

There, I said it.  Organizational transformation, at least in the business world I’m in, implies this massive scrap everything, burn the fields, and start anew approach.  A gigantic change.  A different way forward.  And the term agile transformation?  Oh boy. 

Agile transformation, to me, implies product-delivery-at-all-cost and customers suddenly delighted by an IT department that they’ve despised for decades. It’s slamming everyone in small conference rooms for two week iterations, rewriting all the contracts, and rewiring the entire leadership team. Data lakes and value streams! Experimentation! Value trains! Etc., etc., etc. 

Here’s the thing: transformations don’t happen quickly.

Often, what happens is one team over here says, Hey!  Let’s try this agile thing! So, they give it a go. Then, agile processes start to creep across the organization. There’s no change to compliance methods or the way the program is funded, and leadership is on board only in theory.  Early adopters within an organization are simply finding ways to work around the system; the system has not changed. 

Similarly, (I’ve seen quite a bit of this lately) some of leadership–not all at the same time– decides, Hey! Let’s try this agile thing! So they hire some coaches and a Scrum Master or two and they do some assessments and the coaches give trainings and this department over here sort of starts to try agile and this department over here doesn’t give a crapola about agile and this other person in leadership is open to trying agile but wants all the same rules and regulations abided by.  And then there’s the multiple vendors foaming at the mouth to provide executive briefings and give training by PowerPoint, to scale frameworks and provide strategies on their own flavor of agile that the organization must adopt.

Transfor-what?!

Think about it, how many leadership and agile books have you seen with a butterfly on it?  Don’t get me wrong, I love butterflies as much as the next person.  However, organizations, programs, and individuals don’t get to crawl up into a cocoon, hiding from all outside pressures for 3 weeks, and come out the other end beautiful and fully transformed.

 

Comic about change
Cartoon by audiencestack.com

A Change in Vocabulary

So, let’s not use the word transformation anymore. Instead, let’s use reality based thinking. This is a journey of organizational evolution. Evolution by definition is a process of change in a certain direction.  It’s the process of working out or developing.  It’s chip, chip, chipping away at something.  It’s pivoting even the slightest bit every single day.  In other words, it’s making a difference for the better where we can.  It’s simply making today suck less than yesterday, everyday.

So, go to the willing.  Then again, make something a little better/easier for the unwilling. 

I know you’re thinking, But leadership is essential to an agile transformation! Scaled Agile says so!  I know, I know, I know. I’ve said the same thing numerous times myself.  Just go with me for a second.  Let’s assume this agile initiative is imperfect and messy, which, by the way, it usually- almost-pretty-damn-near-always is.  We’re not after a big bang! quick! transformation, remember?  We’re after evolution, making a real difference that will become part of the organization moving forward. 

I know the other thing you may be thinking, But I’m an Enterprise Agile Coach.  I work on the Ent-er-prise.  My question to you: do you care about the title or doing damn good work?  People make up the Enterprise.  So, help the people make damn good, if not small, changes.        

Just Make a Difference

In moving the needle everyday and evolving every step of the way, you will not see the transformation until it has already happened.  Bumps, bruises, failures, and successes will be along the journey of change.  Every step, every change, every black spot and beautiful shade of orange you will have earned on your way to becoming that butterfly you envisioned– all without a cocoon.

  • Do the roles that nobody else knows how to do until that capability is born.
  • Be the leader you want to see in your organization, and others will catch on.
  • Invite people into any and all conversations. If you believe everyone is needed and everyone has something to contribute, amazing things are possible.
  • A system functions exactly how the people of the system want it to. (Sit with that for a minute.) Until the people change what they want and how they want to achieve it, you’ll never achieve butterfly status.

So, go ahead, get sick of the word transformation, too. Walk the walk. Chin up, sleeves up. And, above all, keep your eye on the next step of evolution.

Darren Hoevel, President, Leadership & Agile Coach

By: Darren Hoevel