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Category: Product Development

Digital Product Development Paradigms – How to become Product-Led instead of a Feature Factory – Poster

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The idea of the organization as a machine is a metaphor that was common 150 years ago, but many people are experiencing it right now too. This is common when what is asked for, and celebrated, is output oriented. Like, for instance, the number of “things” being delivered is counted, reported and the goal is “met” when the ”right” number of features has been shipped. What seems to be lost in theese organizations is the purpose of the organization. What is the actual customer- and business value that the organization should aim to deliver to be successful?

The actual purpose of the organization

The purpose of an organization is of course never to do a specific number of things, or to meet the numbers in budget but to deliver some kind of value to its customers. If you are a bank, maybe the value is making your customers housing dreams come true. And if you are in health care, maybe it is something like helping people live healthy lives longer – and helping those sick to become well faster. Today the trick is to understand this purpose and explore as quickly as possible what solutions would do the customer job-to-be-done they came to you for – as well as give the business vale you are looking for, with a feasable technical solution. To be able to do so we need to use hypothesis driven development, test things, throw them away and try new things. And this is often impossible to plan and co-ordinate if you are not working closely together.

Download the poster here for free in PDF >

Delivering the right thing

Sadly, it seems the main focus for many Agile transformations have been to decrease costs, or become more efficient in “IT”. Many would start by increasing the flow of the organization – which is totally fine, that is always the “first step” and to increase the speed of delivery to actually get something out to the customer. But after that, there should always be a focus on value. Delivering the right thing fast is what we should be looking for. To do so almost always you need to bring several parts of the organization together into one new organization. Often marketing, business, tech and others are needed to make the required shift to reduce “the cost in IT”. If this doesn’t happen, you might become really slow, or delivering the wrong things fast – making you a feature factory.

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User Story Mapping – Free Guide to Download

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The User Story Map is a simple and yet powerful way to visualize the story about how the users are using your product or service – and to build the right thing.

It is simple because it offers support to move quickly from understanding the user and their problems – to building and shipping the product, and it can be done just with sticky notes on a wall, or in simple digital tools.

It is powerful because it tells a story, it gives context to the user story and it gives a clear overview of the backlog and what we need to build to be able to support the user scenarios over all relevant touchpoints. It also supports collaboration and both horizontal and vertical slicing.

I am forever thankful to Jeff Patton who is the creator of User Story Mapping and from who I learned it from about 13 years ago or so. Without it I don’t know where I would have been today. It has been one of the most valuable methods for me to enable deliveries of great user experiences although in very complex domains, real deadlines (like sports events that happens when it happens) with one or up to +20 teams 🙏

Download the User Story Mapping Guide for Free

It is a living, transparent, and value-based backlog that support the Product Owners and teams to find thin slices to release that create real value based on user scenarios, and not features. If you are looking to become a value and product-driven organization, this tool offers a lot of support.

It might not come as a shock to you that the User Story Map is the most common tool used for Agile product planning with one or several teams.  Jeff Patton invented it and brought it in as a major part of the CSPO (Certified Product Owner) training when he first created that many years ago for Scrum Alliance.  Jeff Patton, with a background in UX and design, has been a great force in Agilizing customer-centric ways of working and finding ways to connect it in a natural way to Scrum and product teams.

User Story Map Concepts

A user story map tells a story about a type of person doing something to reach a goal. Make sure to include them in your map along with a little information about them. Try using lightweight personas or roles to describe your users.

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The Value of Agile Product Management

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Agile Product Management

Why do we need Agile Product Management you might think? The main reason is to ensure we are building the right thing. Having both customer focus, and understanding what the priorities are for the business is crucial for most product organizations to survive in a highly competitive market.

When delivering software, digital services, and products in traditional ways we often end up acting on every idea and need we can think of beforehand, without actually knowing if the needs are real and if the solutions would actually help the customer to solve a real problem.

Only half of what we build is being used!

Research shows that most digital solutions are poorly prioritized, where only 20% of the features are being used always or often and 16% sometimes, the rest is just clogging the user interface making it difficult to use, and the user experience terribly ineffective. On top of that, it costs a lot of money not just to build, but also to maintain that 100%. What if we could instead deliver only those 20% or 36%, and in the right order pleasing our users and giving us feedback on how it is being used? This is what good product management is about.

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Strengthening your product strategy 2: action

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HOW TO RUN THE WORKSHOP

Strategy is only as good as its ability to enable your product people to make smart decisions. It must evolve to remain fit for purpose. For those of you who want to make sure your product strategy serves your people, a collaborative approach helps you recognise and prioritise the most crucial gaps to work on.

The last post shares the product strategy health check template. Here’s one way you could work with it to align your POs, PMs, CPOs or whoever is in your product org chart. Co-creation is key to a shared commitment and conviction. Start with asking your product people to identify areas where they want more context. You can enable them a little better, each time, even if the official strategy is still in progress.

Treat it like a Kata, returning monthly or quarterly (but no less frequently) to prioritise the next biggest gap you want to close. A strategy isn’t grown in one night, so this is something that you can make more robust over time, piece by piece. Each time, gather product people to add what they know, then dot vote on which field they most need more data on to make informed decisions. Then split into pairs or small groups, choose one, and work on making it clearer before you next meet. This way, your strategy evolves over time, can gradually be strengthened, and benefits from collective effort. Don’t forget to remove old, irrelevant info as you go too. 

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Product-Led Organization: What it is and Why it Matters to You

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There are many ways businesses can organize to grow and deliver value, but not all of them are equally effective. Melissa Perri, the author of The Build Trap, acknowledges four primary organizational patterns that take very different approaches to achieve growth and value delivery, we have added a fifth pattern that is very common too, the budget-led organization.

Budget-Led Organizations

Budget-led organizations focus on long term planning and mitigate the risk of people working on the wrong thing by having everyone hand in their plans on an often yearly basis and having them reviewed and committed to. This is often a time consuming process, not only to plan, but also to follow up on how all parts of the organization are doing compared to the plan. Important metrics are often deviation from plan as well as obsession over if the work is maintenance or innovation (opex or capex). This type of internal focus gives the organization a locked focus. No matter if the target moves away, the structures are set up to make sure you stick to the obsolete plan. It does not allow new insights to impact what gets delivered and the organization cannot have customer focus nor compete on a fast moving market. Most times people in the organization spend most of their time trying to find ways to game the system to be able to have any success at all.

Sales-Led Organizations

Sales-led organizations work closely with clients to define the product roadmap, taking all of their requests, and sometimes customizing things especially for them. The challenge, however, is when it comes to scaling. Organizations with 50 to 100 customers or more cannot build everything uniquely to match the needs of each customer unless they want to become a bespoke agency. Most products delivered by sales-led organizations suffer from debts in all possible ways; product, usability and tech.

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Strengthening your product strategy 1: assess

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All product companies likely have a document titled Product Strategy, but do they have a real product strategy? Perhaps you’re in charge of the product strategy and want to test and strengthen it. Perhaps you’re a Product Manager feeling the consequences of a strategy that isn’t fulfilling its promise. Do you see any of these symptoms in your product company? 

  • Direct solutions coming from senior stakeholders, without space for product discovery
  • Teams and stakeholders feeling the costs of context switching, working on very different initiatives, and spread thin
  • Teams caught by surprises, needing to help other teams working on very different initiatives
  • Senior product stakeholders unhappy with PM decisions closer to the work, even if the PMs are technically making decisions that fit within the strategy
  • Slick presentations promising upcoming, unvalidated features, rather than focus on opportunities

Alignment is crucial. You can get alignment by directly reviewing decisions, Or, you can share the appropriate information and decision making framework so that others can make smart decisions without the direct oversight. To scale, product leaders can no longer rely on personally approving plans. A leader’s role is to enable their colleagues to make decisions themselves. Especially in the days of hybrid workspaces, it’s all about the flow of information. Your strategy plays a huge role in that information flow. 

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The Product Organizational Design Patterns in a Nutshell

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In this poster, I have collected some organizational design patterns from Agile product organizations at scale. The highlighted questions might serve as an entry point to different topics, such as design principles for the organization, strategy for growing teams and individuals, how to enable autonomy and alignment and how to design the leadership teams to support and grow an awesome product organization that delivers products customers love.

UPDATE JUNE 2023: Scrum of Scrum added as a pattern in the English poster.

Download the Product Organizational Design Patterns poster in high-resolution as PDF >

Buy printed A1 poster >

You can also download it in:

German >

Highlighted questions to reflect over in this poster

  • How do we measure success?
  • What are our guiding principles?
  • Are we optimizing for flow?
  • Are we optimizing for value?
  • What is the capability we need to scale?
  • How do we enable flow of information?
  • What is the Minimum Valuable Bureaucracy
  • What roles do we need in our leadership team?
  • How do we grow teams & individuals?
  • What type of teams do we need?
  • How do we enable both autonomy & alignment?
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Another framework won’t bring you agility

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Agility is about adapting and delivering value. More and more organisations are discovering that they either need to get on the agile train or fall hopelessly behind. 

Many of them turn to frameworks to adapt agile ways of  working. But what they get is another framework that will sit  on top of  the others and cause more confusion and frustration. What they need is to focus on the real problems like organisation, leadership  and culture. I’m going to use SAFe as an example in this text (there are other frameworks trying to solve this out there but I know more about SAFe).

A framework with a clear hierarchical role chart, process arrows, planning cycles and new roles is a way of satisfying the controlling part of an organisation. And it is exactly this part that we need to remove, if we want to be truly agile. To dare go down the agile road you need trust from leaders and in many organisations that is the exact thing they are lacking. So their own fear of losing control drives them to turn to things their recognize, roles and hierarchy, processes and planning, things that are feeding the controlling needs and is satisfying their own fears.

When introducing a framework like SAFe you are forced to focus on roles and planning cycles instead of culture, organisation and leadership. To get the right people in these roles is not an easy task an one that is impossible if there are no people with an agile mindset in the organisation. When people without agile mindset take on these roles what we get is another gant chart and detailed planning that will not adapt to the changing needs of the customer.

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Agile Leadership in a Nutshell – Free Poster

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When Agile becomes something for the whole organization leadership needs to adapt to support Agile values and principles. Take the opportunity to give energy and grow a leadership that supports an organization fit for the future. Let’s build an Agile Mindset that can change how leaders act in their daily activities, how they lead people and business, form organizations and governance.

Free Download of the English Agile leadership in a Nutshell poster in High resolution (PDF)

French Translation of this poster >

Portuguese Translation of this poster >

Spanish Translation of this poster >

Italian Translation of this poster >

Turkish Translation of this poster >

German Translation of this poster >

German Translation of this poster (school) >

Buy printed A1 poster >

EDIT 2021: The poster is now updated to ver 1.2 with some improvements and better connection to transformational leadership and theory X and Y.

This poster is for me a way to visualize key concepts for how to lead with an Agile Mindset. At Dandy People we use it in our Agile coaching and training. We hope you as well can have use for it in your work. Please let us know if you have any feedback or questions on this poster.

To Lead in Complexity

The basis for Agile leadership is that we need to have a leadership that works in complexity – that support flexibility, transparency, collaboration and authonomy to enable the “workers” to make smart tactical and operative decisions to reach well defined impact goals. There are several common leadership concepts that support this kind of leadership;

  • Catalyst Leadership
  • Management 3.0
  • Systems Thinking
  • Servant Leadership

Three leadership Styles

In the poster there are three leadership styles visualized;

  • Catalyst Leadership (Best for Agile)
  • Achiever
  • Expert

The infographic contains numerous of illustrations to visualize some of the behaviours of each leadership style. I believe (without perhaps any support from research) that you can change leadership style to become a Catalyst Leader if  you make this decision, practice and work on it. I also believe that the environment we live and act in shapes how we behave and what we might see as good leadership.

Agile Mindset and what it might mean in Reality

When you understand that Agile actually is a way of thinking, a mindset, and not a process ot tools, it usually unlocks the “next level” in your game. But many leaders might find it quite difficult to put the Agile mindset to practice in reality. What does it really mean for governance? How do we build organizations, create good salary models, plan our projects, grow our staffs knowledge, build teams…? I have covered just a tiny part of that in this poster, the list could go on forever I know.

Need Coaching and Training for Agile Leadership?
Coaching Agile Leadership

If you need help to reshape the leadership in your organization to support your Agile journey, let us know and we’ll happily join forces with you to coach and train your managers and every one else who can become leaders. (more…)

Agile User Experience in Nutshell- with a Dash of Lean UX – Free Poster

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Many Agile teams are struggling to connect user experience and the design process with Agile ways of working and often Scrum. In this Poster (and post) I´m trying to describe the connection, and how you can collaborate in the team to learn more about user needs and solutions to solve real user problems together. I´ve been using this poster for over a year in my combined PO and UX training (Build the Right Product – Innovation through Collaboration & Design Thinking) and in my Agile coaching.

Download the Agile User Experience in a Nutshell in high resolution (PDF) >

Download in Portuguese >

Download in Spanish >

Download in Turkish >

Buy printed A1 poster >

Agile User Experience in a Nutshell Poster

My hope is that this poster might give some guidance in how User Experience can work in an Agile setup in combination with the posters; Agile Product Ownership in a Nutshell and Agile in a Nutshell (with a spice of Lean UX).

What does UX mean?

UX stands for User Experience. Basically, the expected and needed user experience of the service or digital product to meet user and business goals. To connect user needs and business goals is basic when working with user experience, it is basic to meet users and understand who they are – and involve and understand stakeholders. Any team can work with UX as long as they get to do this, and have the methods and processes to do it in a structured and effective way. (more…)

Translated to French – Agile Product Ownership in a Nutshell Poster

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Let’s kick start the new year 2018 with a translation of this poster also in French! Thank you so much for your help with the translation with this poster as well Nicolas Mereaux!

Nicolas has already translated the Agile in a Nutshell poster to French that you can find for download here >

Here you can download the French Agile Product Ownership Poster for free in high resolution (PDF) >

French Agile Product Ownership in a Nutshell Poster

All other Agile posters in all languages can be found through the Agile Explained Infographic Collection page >

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The Innovation Map – Go from a Snail to a Shark – Free Download

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To be able to stay focused on what really matters you need to have a clear strategy. When companies are small it is not always easy to have a clear strategy and act on it, but it is usually a lot easier than in big companies. To be able to do innovation and also stay customer focused even in big organisations a clear vision and strategy is essential. And every one in the organisation needs to understand the strategy.

There is a research done by Harvard Business School saying only 5% of the employees know about their business strategy. This is really scary for anyone running a business, and something everyone in a position to make strategic decisions needs to take really seriously. If people in the organisation don’t know about, or understand the vision or the strategy, how can they then make tactical and operational smart decisions making the business go in the right direction? There is only one answer to that question, they cant.

A Collaboration and Visualization tool to make Strategy Transparent

This fall I’ve been doing a talk around the topic “Customer Focused with an Agile Mindset” where I talk about how leaders of organizations need to grow an Agile mindset and make a strategic decision to become customer focused to be able to survive in the fast moving complex world of today, and how that can be done. The Innovation Map is one of the slides of my talk and I’ve been getting a lot of great feedback on it. Something many people feel is missing today is a holistic overview of the different strategies the organization have, and to be able to use it in their daily work making sure they are on the right track.

The Innovation Map is a great tool to be able to visualize what strategic initiatives the organisation have, or perhaps don’t have. Also it can be used to visualize the initiatives TOGETHER, ACROSS the organization. In this way when involving more people we can easier see the full picture of where we are going, and what we can do about it. By involving the people working front line with the customers knowing about their needs as well as those that can create the solutions to help the customers and not only management, you grow both an understanding of what the business strategy is – AND – you get their valuable knowledge of what the customer needs are and what can actually be possible to do or not do today and in the future. Then it will be up to management to prioritize the strategy based on different business scenarios.

Download the FREE Innovation Map Now (.pdf)

innovation map

Debt in any level will eat your business

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