Embracing Change: Agile's Impact on Adapting to Market Dynamics
Today’s market is changing rapidly - all day, every day. There’s no more resting your laurels in product management and business in general. There are competitors already, and there will be more soon. This can be worrying, but doesn’t have to be, with proper internal processes. This is where the Agile methodology comes into play paired with Scrum. An Agile process that delivers value incrementally will ensure that you as a product manager can succeed and ride the wave of change rather than get swept up in it. Adapting to change quickly and efficiently will keep your business competitive, innovative and psychologically safe. Bad processes will mess up even a good team over time. Agile principles help organizations stay flexible and responsive to market changes, so that they can carve out their own niche into the market while gaining and retaining customers in the face of adversity.
To respond to change, you must first understand it. Change in the market includes customer behavior, technology shifts, competition, regulation changes, budget changes and other surprises that tend to get in the way of building a successful product. These obstacles can cause businesses to shake up roadmaps or reallocate resources previously set for a certain project or feature, commonly called SOS or Shiny Object Syndrome. This is not good if it’s happening in your company, and it’s up to you to stop it in its tracks. The need to change can send stakeholders in a spiral making requests and generally slowing or outright preventing the value delivery that’s necessary to be successful. For those with a roadmap set in stone or building a massive project feature, these can be devastating especially if/when they impact resources or force a timeline that is unrealistic. Telling everyone to do everything is a quick way to get nothing done. It must be clear across teams what is important and what isn’t, and you need to have adaptable processes to surf upon the waves of change.
As mentioned earlier, the Agile methodology along with Scrum can be the surfboard, if we continue that analogy, allowing you to stay above the surface and even pull off a sweet ride and high value product while doing so. Agile involves iterative development, customer collaboration and responding to change. Scrum adds in cross-functional teams ready to tackle any problem along with a solid meeting cadence to keep everyone pulling in the same direction. The incremental nature of both allow you to learn and implement change in bite size pieces. These pieces are the sprints, typically run in two week intervals. They allow you to plan along with your team what will be done the next two weeks and gives the whole team an opportunity to provide feedback and fully understand the work to be done.
After a sprint, the retrospective process will make sure that you learn from each one by discussing what went well, what didn’t go so well and what can be changed to improve value delivery within the team. Planning massive time consuming products or setting a roadmap in stone and committing to it is classic waterfall, and to put it one way, waterfall has lost the war against Agile in software product management. My speciality is Agile software product management, so I can’t comment with certainty that Agile is the best fit in other business models, but I can guess that it probably is, outside of construction projects and other things that need to be completely and fully planned to succeed.
The waterfall method is sure to create low value products or even create nothing at all as change causes the roadmap to adjust so drastically that resources are lost and teams can lose their morale. By building in change to your process with incremental, iterative approaches to value delivery, change will never be a surprise to the team as each two week interval is planned out together and every time a sprint ends you can take all the knowledge uncovered during that sprint and any changing market dynamics in stride. This allows the team to get better over time and makes less of a disruption when you suddenly need to make an application change due to legal regulations or specific stakeholder demands.
The iterative process provided by Agile and supported by Scrum allow the team to be masters of change and remain unphased by anything that should come their way. It also builds up more resilient and psychologically safe teams that are free to innovate, create and accomplish. The feedback loops created here provide the stage for rapid improvement. You’ll be surprised if/when you get a team running Agile and see the improvement. It can be night and day and drastically change the workplace. You’re bound to run into some folks who don’t like change or who are uncooperative with you and the Agile methods, even after giving them the benefit of the doubt and trying to educate them. Frankly, they should be fired from the project when discovered. One bad egg will spoil them all and prevent you from seeing true value and progress. Too many companies allow assholes to stay in roles they shouldn’t be, and Agile is great for identifying the asshole and or remedying the problem by providing collaboration and communication instead of competition and uncertainty.
The customer centric approach of Agile will also help you to build exactly what the customer needs, nothing more and nothing less. The job is to create value for the customer, not to build something that you love or take in every piece of feedback as if it were the word or the way. In Agile product management, the customer is actually always right. That being said, sometimes you as a product manager will need to take what the customer “wants” and instead give them what they “need”. This is the artform of product management and becomes much easier with cross-functional and collaborative teams that can adapt quickly while identifying problems, knowns and unknowns. The iterative cycles we’ve discussed so far will lead to continuous releases out to customers so they can see that incremental value and know that the team is improving the software. Nothing will impact retention more than getting blocked up on releases. You want to release as often as possible provided the QA efforts can be completed fully between those cycles.
The quick pivots that an Agile team can make will provide value to customers but also to stakeholders. It makes the team essentially immune to surprise; you can throw anything, within reason, at a well running Agile team, and it will be broken down into stories, prepped for a future sprint and accomplished. This gives you as the product manager a great way to estimate timelines. Gone are the days of true estimates. You'll know exactly how many story points the team can get done each sprint and use this number to estimate with a high degree of accuracy. This in turn will please internal stakeholders, investors and more. The cross-functional teams that Scrum creates will lead to having the right people on the call at all times. No need to submit things to other departments or wait on a review from design if you have design on the calls. You should have subject matter experts in the group if needed along with anyone else that would be needed to meet the definition of done. This leads to fast on the spot decision making and helps all the departments and representatives of the product stay aligned.
Agile methodologies are a short term gain with exponential results over time. Allowing for a serious impact long term. The continuous improvement and innovation will do wonders for a product and end up creating far better solutions than those that can be planned in full right from the start. Locking a roadmap in place or designing a massive feature without taking steps to get there is making a massive assumption that you or whoever is involved in the planning knows absolutely everything. Be humble and use Agile, you can more reasonably say you know everything about the next two weeks than you can the next two quarters.
Agile has a way of creeping out of teams and up org charts to create an Agile culture that embraces change. It can teach stakeholders to avoid shiny object syndrome and show them when and how to provide feedback that will be acted on overtime while providing incremental value to convince them to keep doing so. I’ve mentioned psychological safety; this is paramount to building great teams and products. Google did a study called project Aristotle that found out the best teams they had were the best because they had more psychological safety on the teams. This means no assholes. Collaboration and communication are essential along with respect for everyone participating in a project. This allows dissenting opinions to be handled in stride rather than cause a rift in teams and will save so much time in the long run.
At the end of the day, you want an Agile team running Scrum to be the most successful product manager you can be. Plain and simple. This will give you the process to embrace and even love change; it will empower teams while making happier stakeholders and customers. The customer will get their needs met which will improve retention and acquisition. Improvement there helps the entire business de-stress and ensures long term success. Change is unavoidable so you may as well set up these processes to adapt to the change as efficiently as possible. The obstacle is not just an obstacle but the way forward. If you don’t know enough about Agile or Scrum to implement this, watch some videos or take a certification to brush up then recruit your leaders to help enact change across the organization. Go out now and build better teams, better products and better work morale, and you’ll be sure to succeed as a product manager.