Agile for Product Managers: What to expect

When 17 people met in 2001 to address the need for a software development framework that can acknowledge and adapt to dynamic, fast-paced, and ever-changing market landscapes, Agile was born!

Disruption is common across businesses, thanks to competitors, politics, geographies, changing user needs, and so on. So it’s only natural to face hurdles while trying to address these disruptions using rigid processes and frameworks.

In traditional project management setups, these disruptions/changes can end up costing a huge amount of time and resources.

Agile is the answer to all these problems. In an agile setup, ‘being ready for change and accepting it’ is at the core of management. Yes, we are still gathering requirements, designing & developing solutions, and testing the deliveries, but rather than focusing on extensive upfront documentation, processes, and plans, agile shifts the focus to an iterative approach of dealing with small tasks with much more collaboration.

4 Agile values are 🎯-

credits — questionpro.com

For product managers, the responsibilities still include being responsible for product strategy, goals alignment, development, and launch; the methodology employed to get there (scum, kanban, lean, etc. in agile) might differ across organizations.

Before we assume that agile can be a solution to a majority of product/project management problems, let’s establish that it is more of a mindset than a rigid framework or process. Let’s have a look at the improvements agile has offered over the traditional waterfall approach.

Agile vs Waterfall 🤜🤛

Before agile came into the picture, major IT and services companies were managing their projects/products by employing Waterfall lifecycle. As the name suggests, Waterfall is an incremental and linear management methodology. Development is often a sequence of processes with dependencies on the stage that precedes them.

credits — javapoint.com

For instance, as the image suggests, product designing cannot start unless we have frozen all the requirements. In this case, to the product manager who is thinking of going lean with the MVP 😆—

Good Luck!!

Waterfall by design is very rigid because of dependencies and averseness for change. Any change to requirements during the later stages of development needs to be approved, documented, and analyzed for risk. These methods might still work for organizations with less or no appetite for risk, the need for upfront budgeting and timelines, but not so much for the dynamic markets we often find ourselves a part of.

To tackle the challenges and shortcomings of traditional development methodologies, agile follow these 12 principles -

1. Customer satisfaction is at the core of work delivery
2. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development
3. Continuous delivery, with a preference to the shorter timescale
4. Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project
5. To support and trust individuals to get the work done
6. Preference for face-to-face conversations
7. Working software is the primary measure of progress
8. Promoting sustainable development to be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely
9. Attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility
10. Simplicity is essential
11. The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams
12. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective

Combining the values and the principles of agile, we can understand that agile focuses heavily on collaboration, technical excellence, continuous delivery while making sure we devise ‘just enough’ processes, documentation, and plans.

Agile methodologies and frameworks:

Alistair Cockburn, one of the initiators of the agile movement in software development suggested that a methodology is a set of conventions that a team agrees to follow. Although there are many famous methodologies under the umbrella of agile, Scrum (and a few others like Lean, Kanban) is so widely used, that it has become a framework now.

Credit — scrum.org

The key objectives of scrum are to bring people together to productively address and solve complex business problems while self-organizing, learning through experience, and building iteratively.

For some of us, who have been confusing scrum with agile, let’s establish:

“scrum is the framework that helps get the work done and it inherits the principles like continuous improvements from agile”

At the core, scrum is about making sure that :

• The workstream is drilled to the simplest level (epics, stories) and
• The teams understand the business and user problems they are trying to solve
• The work gets delivered in continuous iterations
• The team collaborates and learn regularly while delivering the work

Circling back on how these methodologies and frameworks affect a product manager’s job, while the roles and responsibilities remain the same, the execution gets changed. Let’s talk about some of these responsibilities:

1. Product Strategy and road mapping — One of the key differences between how roadmaps are done in agile vs how they were done earlier is how distant in the future are they planned for. As we understand, agile is all about accepting changes. While having a long-term roadmap helps teams prepare well for the future, in agile the guiding principle is flexibility. Therefore, roadmaps in an agile setting are less rigid and concrete. They do not dwell deep on exact features and long stretched timelines but focus more on direction, vision, and outcomes.
2. Prioritization — Prioritization is one of the most, if not the most important skills of a product manager. Once a PM has a roadmap, the next task is to pick what gets built and why. Prioritization in agile is done to address ‘just enough’ requirements and scope. In scrum, the product backlog holds the upcoming requirements in the form of epic, user stories, bugs, and tasks. It is then the responsibility of a product owner/manager to make sure that the team has at least one iteration worth of task prioritized. More about prioritization techniques like RICE, MoSCoW, Impact-effort matrix coming soon 🤝
3. Development and delivery — The development process in agile is iterative. This means that the work gets done in measurable and manageable timelines (called sprints in scrum). Iterations help teams manage change well and pivot easily if necessary. For a product manager, this works like a charm if the product belongs to a fast-paced industry or if it is in the initial development phase. Small iterations also help deliver and ship products faster.

Agile Implementation for Product focused organizations

Although agile seems like a perfect fit for today’s markets and dynamic teams, it is not a one shoe fits all solution. If the products are built for an industry that has very little appetite for risk and change (like defense, healthcare hardware, etc.) with fixed budgets and timelines, waterfall might work like a charm.

However, if the organization and the product teams resonate with the agile principles, undertaking an agile transformation needs the product leaders to take care of the following points:

1. The appetite for change and uncertainty should be communicated with all the stakeholders. As we’ve already discussed, long-term budget, timelines, and roadmaps are not ideal in an agile setup. This might not be accepted openly by all the stakeholders like executives, investors, etc.
2. The expectations around communication should be established. If the majority of the team believes in writing long documents and communicating in silos, it could affect the implementation strategies as soon as a few days (due to continuous iterations).
3. A product manager doesn’t have to manage everything by himself/herself. Thanks to agile, new roles like Product Owner, Scrum Master have come into the picture to aid the task of product development and delivery. Defining a clear product vision and making sure the product is headed in the right direction can be a task shared among the Product Manager and Product Owner.

Agile is an ever-evolving mindset that is open to interpretations from industry experts and individual teams alike. The most important thing to remember is the values and principles that have built agile.

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