TL; DR: Escaping the Feature Factory — Refocussing From Output to Outcome
The feature factory fate is not inevitable; there is hope to avoid becoming a mere cog in the machinery. Learn how!
In many large organizations, Scrum teams fall into the ‘feature factory’ trap, focusing more on churning out features than creating real value. It’s too bad that this shift undermines Agile principles and hampers long-term success and innovation. Let’s discuss how and why this happens and what we can do to break the chains of the feature factory.
TL; DR: HoA #42: Lean Roadmapping and OKRs w/ Janna Bastow
In this energizing 42nd Hands-on Agile session on Lean Roadmapping, Janna Bastow, the go-to-authority on product roadmaps, talked about being lean while creating and maintaining your roadmap and how objectives and key results (OKR) may help meet that challenge.
TL; DR: HoA #38: Ask-Me-Anything w/ Roman Pichler: The Product Owner
In this energizing 38th Hands-on Agile session, Roman Pichler delved into your questions on the role of the Product Owner. The topics range from product manager vs. Product Owner vs. business analyst to the right size of a Product Backlog to linking product vision to Product Goal and Sprint Goal.
Scrum has proven to be an effective product delivery framework for all sorts of products. However, Scrum is equally well suited to build the wrong product efficiently as its Achilles heel has always been the product discovery part. What product discovery part, you may think now. And this is precisely the point: The Product Owner miraculously identifies what is the best way to proceed as a Scrum Team by managing the Product Backlog. How that is supposed to happen is nowhere described in the Scrum Guide. Consequently, when everyone is for themselves, product discovery anti-patterns emerge.
From sunk costs, HIPPO-ism, my-budget-my-features to self-fulfilling prophecies — learn more about the numerous product discovery anti-patterns that can manifest themselves when you try to fill Scrum’s product discovery void.
The end of 2020 is nearing, and it’s product roadmap building time again—at least for those companies that are still dedicated to the old command-and-control model. In the next few weeks, executives and (key) stakeholders will come together and define new functionality that they believe will meet business demands in 2021.
While investing in product roadmaps can yield a reasonable return by creating a shared understanding between the “the business” and product teams, I also believe that product roadmaps need to be living artifacts requiring continuous attention by everyone involved. To make that process as worthwhile as possible, adhering to the following seven product roadmap first principles has proven beneficial in my experience.
TL;DR: Product Roadmap Failure: Stop Setting Them Up To Fail
When dealing with product roadmap failure, stop debating whether you are doing product roadmaps “right”, or whether roadmaps are evil. Look instead at the job you are hiring your roadmap to achieve. And then ask if the roadmap is the best tool for the job.
TOC
14 Common Product Roadmap Failures
A Summary of Almost all Methodology Debates on Twitter
Roadmap Needs and Being Awesome
New to Product Management? What is a product roadmap? For a standard definition see here.
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