This was a good read by Terry Schmidt, with some fantastic practical tools such as the LogFrame used for strategic product planning, which also generates a hypothesis.
A good alternative to the VMOST framework.
Whilst Agile frameworks such as Scrum and Kanban are a great way of taking steps towards becoming more Agile, it’s important to remember amongst their own principles and guidelines, that the ultimate objective is to deliver customer value/the product vision in an efficient and competitive way.
To help avoid losing sight of this objective and falling into the trap of obsessing about the intricate details of the frameworks too much, it’s important that gap analysis is done frequently on the actual Agile manifesto and principles themselves to see how you can shape the Agile framework to achieve agility and the real benefits of being Agile.
The 4 Agile Values/Manifesto
The 12 Agile Principles
How Spotify have adopted Agile
The product development lifecycle is complex, but in order for it to run like a well oiled machine there needs to be solid product management at the heart.
The below video explains Agile Product Ownership incredibly well and covers:
A typical Product Manager R&R would also be:
More info here on how to scale product when the time is right.
A self-organised development team working together successfully to achieve common goals within the sprint boundary (typically every two weeks) is only possible if the teams ceremonies are done which includes:
In order for the scrum team to be able to fulfil their commitments they should be getting significant help, guidance and support from the Scrum Master or Team Lead, Product Manager and the Development Manager and only once the above points (basics) are being done well, can a team start to seriously look to improve their velocity and scale successfully.
Development teams should decide what agile development framework they adopt/try out using retrospectives to aid improvements and change.
The way teams operate is significantly different between Scrum and Kanban, but the fundamentals of business delivery stay the same eg. Prioritisation, frequency of delivering value to customers, agile software delivery and development team structure/support. So what are the differences:
Scrum
Kanban
Both Scrum and Kanban have plenty of pros, cons and bring different challenges to the table, but give software engineers the autonomy to get through the backlog without sprint boundaries or artificial deadlines then you’ll likely see productivity, quality and communication increase, with the caveat that they must have strong support from the team lead, dev manager and product manager who aren’t afraid to get stuck in.
With marketing departments typically focusing on P&L / ROI of ad campaigns and product development on product quality, product feature enhancements / performance and customer UX, it’s easy for the two business areas to be fragmented which could make the end goal harder to reach.
Ironically although the individual department goals for both are normally so separate and different, the most common problems they face can sometimes be solved by the other eg. Acquisition marketing unable to increase incremental volume because the CPA / ROI / ARPU of the additional media spend doesn’t look healthy, yet fixing some bugs around the product feature in question, a feature enhancement or a new product release is likely to contribute to the solution that allows a raft of new customers through the door efficiently. Vice versa, a new shiny product or feature where the target audience is so niche that acquisition marketing efficiency / volume is poor or it’s unlikely existing customers will benefit, then it’ll be an uphill struggle to make the product viable.
Fortunately the majority of brands have both of these areas in-house so it does make optimising the relationships and responsibilities easier. Naturally one area cannot exist without the other even when you look at brands like Google and Facebook who have groundbreaking products, yet still require nicely crafted ad campaigns to generate incremental revenue.
Product developers don’t bite and marketers don’t just care about ad campaign performance, so close collaboration which is vital can be achieved by letting down a shield and discussing problems openly and bravely, so that multiple solutions can be discussed and you never know, the problem you thought was a tough problem to solve, may not be so tough anymore.
Again, close collaboration is key and potentially another way of aiding / fast tracking an improved relationship is by recruiting a marketer or two into the product development arena or vice versa.
The two departments working collaboratively to solve problems could lead to some spectacular chemistry.
No matter how much marketing you deliver, whether it’s billions of banners on the most premium sites in the world or you’re top of key generics consistently for Google, unless you have a stable product offering which customers genuinely embrace, then your brand has a fairly bleak future.
Historically you could spend your way out of a crisis, but now if your site crashes often, you hide key T&Cs, mis-sell promotions, have a complex user journey, product not available on multiple devices, then in a few years time your brand value will show a clear decline which would eventually kill your business unless you adapt fast.
I think the below video demonstrates the future in a fantastic way and how consumers will shape products, businesses and communication. The good thing about the future is that it will kill a lot of cow boys who are short sited and have no long term business strategy.