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- 1. Lost in the Agile Jungle Product Management Festival Zürich 15 November 2018 Christian Becker
- 2. “Analyze” “Define” “Execute” “Communicate” 90 10 “Customer centric” “User research” “Validate assumptions” “Agile methodologies” 100 recent PM job offers
- 3. Lab Test A/B Test Idea Live Today’s agile product management
- 4. Doing Talking 95% 5% Today’s agile product management
- 5. Stupid boss Headless management with no plan Strategy unclear Stakeholder not engaged Picture: A Gude on Flickr Roadmap too busy Poor product manager
- 6. The problem
- 7. Personas Lean Startup Scrum Kanban Lean UX Customer Journey Story Mapping Business Model Canvas Lean Canvas A/B Tests Lab Tests Design Sprint Job-to-be-done Interviews Portfolio Management Value Stream MappingBusiness Model Generation Empathy Map Value Proposition Design Scrumban Hypotheses-driven User Story Prototyping MVP Impact Mapping Product Mission Design Studio Story Board Design Thinking Lean Product Management The problem behind the problem Picture: Incidencematrix on Wikimedia
- 8. Sweet poison
- 9. Pictures: A. Schwarzkopf and Trollbackco on Wikimedia Agile never really made it into our offices Customer close Customer remote
- 10. Pictures: Thctamm on Wikimedia and A Gude on Flickr Nerd with boss and stakeholders Nerds among themselves We are nerds
- 11. What boss and stakeholders hear from us “I can not explain what I am doing and why.“ “I don‘t know what the product will look like.“ “I don‘t know when the product will be ready.“
- 12. Trump picture: Gage Skidmore on Flickr No trust I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works! Backlog Backlog
- 13. Rank Project Costs Benefit 1 Redesign Home ++ +++ 2 Relaunch Checkout + ++ 3 Blog ++ ++ 4 Ad Placements + + 5 Tracking ++ + 6 Relaunch Detail Page +++ ++ Excel prioritization
- 14. + = Fixed scope and fixed timing
- 15. UX 2012 UX 2018 In vogue staffing
- 16. Lab Test A/B Test Idea Live Lowest common denominator
- 17. Victim Criminal Bild: A Gude auf Flickr
- 18. Bild: Incidencematrix auf Wikimedia Exit?
- 19. Method WHAT MethodWHY WHAT First WHY and WHAT then method
- 20. (Able to) cover all Idea Live Maintenance
- 21. WHY and WHAT Mandate • Why do we want to do what? • How to measure success? • Which constraints to consider? Test • What are the critical assumptions? • What do we need to learn next? • Can we fulifil our mandate with our solution? Understand • Who is our customer/user? • Which problems to solve? • Which constraints to consider? Ideation • What are possible solutions? • On which concept to bet? Idea Live Maintenance
- 22. Idea Live Maintenance Idea Live Maintenance Non-linear thinking
- 23. The excursion model Heavily stolen from Nikkel Blaase and Jan Milz Mandate • Why do we want to do what? • How to measure success? • Which constraints to consider? Test • What are the critical assumptions? • What do we need to learn next? • Can we fulifil our mandate with our solution? Understand • Who is our customer/user? • Which problems to solve? • Which constraints to consider? Ideation • What are possible solutions? • On which concept to bet?
- 24. The excursion model in action Idea Live Maintenance
- 25. „I understand why we want to do what until when.“ „I don‘t know how the product will look like.“ „I can tell you where we are and what to do next.“ What boss and stakeholders should hear from us
- 26. Trump picture: Gage Skidmore on Flickr Magic can happen Oh well, I try so hard to be his friend – and maybe someday that will happen!
Editor's Notes
- Story: I had to write a job description for a PM position lately As reference I looked at actual job descriptions online I was pretty surprised by the content so I ended up reading 100 descriptions Result: 90% only focused on standard topics Only 10% focuses on topics that relate to „agility“
- Story: And that matches perfectly what I see every day in real PM The vast majority of product developments follow a standard path of having customer contact only at the very end in form of some lab and split testing Especially early stages of product development hardly see any customer touchpoints and customer-driven iterations
- Story: Despite agile principles being around for more than 15 years now, we still talk much more about agile PM than we actually do it. The standard answer of PMs WHY that is more or less looks the same everywhere I go ...
- Story: Standard answer for not being agile: „I would love to do it but I can‘t because of all the impediments.“ All of those reasons might be true, but I belief there is another powerful root cause ...
- Story: ... and this root course looks like this This is a real example from my early days as a product consultant some 6 years ago With these slides I wanted to describe how I would run a product discovery project for a customer from the very first idea to a validated prototype within 6 weeks While the basic approach still looks right to me, there is one fundamental problem: The overall plan is so complex that people outside PM have no chance to understand it. And even worse, I today still can not explain it under 30mins so that others will understand it How can I expect to run a project “agile” if I can not explain what I am doing and why?
- Story: I belief that the problem behind the problem is the jungle of agile methods There are hundreds of more or less distinct approaches out there and that is basically great news But each method only covers a small part of the whole story So everybody is trying to make sense of it all by combining different parts in different ways – ending in a picture like that we have just seen on the previous slide Because everybody has a different picture, everybody will tell a different story what „agile“ means. Overall, this leads to total confusion and finally to unrepairable damage to the principles of agility
- Story: The jungle becomes more dense and incomprehensible every day Agile PM is fully commercialized. Part of this is that all authors promise and market the ultimate weapon But the opposite is true: All approaches only cover only a very small part of our every day problems Hardly any concept describes prerequisites and boundaries and how to make use of it in the greater and often changing context of PM For example design sprint is currently still hot and I see some organizations only focusing on doing these sprints. But a design sprint is actually pretty much limited and by no means a standard weapon for all PM problems. A design sprint requires a deep understanding of the problem space upfront and provides only one iteration for one bigger desirability problem in 5 days. However, I have never seen a product that is ready for scaling after just one iteration. So why is design sprint hot? Because it has a good marketing story and is easy enough to sell as a service Same with CSPO: It has been established as standard based on good marketing and sales so that almost every PM has that certificate. But how much does that certificate help you in your daily problems as PM?
- Story: The sad truth is that despite all that sophisticated and heavily marketed methodologies agile never made it to our fancy offices We still don‘t have the right answers to get a customer focus when the customer is remote We focus on developing more complex methods all the time to deal with an increasingly complex world – until we ourselves don‘t understand all that stuff anymore Every street food shop is better in understanding customer needs.
- Story: I belief that we PMs have developed into nerds But there is a big difference between those lucky nerds in laboratories and us as PMs: While the guys in the laboratory are left on their own, we have bosses and stakeholders that we need to align with because product is a topic where everybody has an opinion on and wants to play with.
- Story: So, what do theses bosses and stakeholders hear from us?
- Story: Result of that conversation: No trust and a backlog based on alternative facts.
- Story: How does a backlog look like that is based on alternative facts and opinion? It most likely is table with a ranking based on gut feelings where the pet project of your boss will be on rank 1.
- Story: When there is no trust and no clear story and agreement behind your backlog, there can be only one criteria how to judge the outcome: Delivery of a fixed scope in fixed timing.
- Story: Another result of us as PMs not being able to communicate what we are doing and why is strange staffing behavior. The best example for this is UX: It took years and a lot of sweat and tears until it was common practice to have UX as part of product management Nowadays I see organizations go to the other extreme of hiring UX like hell without even knowing why Main characteristic for the agile jungle in action is that things are being done without reflecting anymore – just because it has become a standard.
- Story: When we sum all this up, we end up with just the product development process that we have seen before. Lab tests and A/B testing have reached the critical level of acceptance and don‘t hurt anymore, while the phases earlier are still too fuzzy and remain agile wasteland.
- Story: So, I believe there is a different story behind the miserable state of agile product development!
- Story: The crucial question is how to get out of the jungle? Or, to phrase it as a challenge: How might we make agile PM simple and digestible again so that we know what we are doing and can convince others to follow?
- Story: The basic principle is pretty simple: Starting with the method determines the WHAT right from the start and predetermines the outcome. So, just as we should not think in product solutions right away before understanding the problem, we should not apply any method without having understood WHY we want to do WHAT upfront. Also: Discussing the WHY and the WHAT is possible in simple words and terms and is the right format to align and put in the required focus And there is another implication: Starting with the WHY and WHAT is a self-check whether we really understood what we are doing – again: every PM who does just stuff is damaging agile PM as a whole as this undermines the credibility piece by piece.
- Story The hard thing about it: If you want to do more than the usual lab and split tests, you need to deal with the early phases of product development And in the early phases of product development things become more complex and fuzzy and difficult to master Focusing on the WHY and WHAT helps us to reduce complexity and not getting lost
- Story: The WHY and WHAT of early product development phases can be structured like this: Mandate ... Understand ... Ideation ... Test .... This structure should help you to identify the right questions at the right time without getting lost Again, on this slide you won‘t find a single method HOW to tackle each segment – that simple depends on the context of each project and your approach and that is your task But of course, the model is a method in itself However, this model is not quite right yet …
- Story: In reality, a product development is a chaotic process So, the idea whole idea of having a linear product development process is not right Therefore, it makes sense to extend the WHY and WHAT model a bit and then we end up having ....
- Story: ... the Excursion Model The central idea behind the Excursion Model is a neutral point outside of the four segments. This neutral point should be revisited frequently to reflect and rethink where you are and where you want to go next You can think of it a bit like the central point on a squash court where you should always go back to after having hit the ball to reset and to decide where to go next depending on the current situation. So this neutral point triggers you not to go linear through a product development but to reflect and take a deliberate decision what to do next, so for example... .. you can end up after an understand phase with new facts that question the mandate ... you can test things and end up having more questions than before, so you back to the understanding phase
- Story: Mapped to the chaotic product development, the excursion model will look like this.
- Story: Based on the Excursion Model the whole discussion with boss and stakeholders should change.