Agile*Product*AI

The Product Concept Document (PCD) is used by larger companies with significant product portfolios to get product/project funding approvals, cross-organizational alignment, and guidance from leadership and key stakeholders. The PCD serves as an initial blueprint for a new product, describing the customer need, business objectives, value proposition, high-level features, and market considerations. The PCD describes why the product is being created and how it aligns with the organization's goals. The PCD is used by the organization to review and approve material product investment and resource allocation needs and opportunities. The PCD is focused on the why and high-level what. It provides the appropriate depth and breadth of information for business leaders to make decisions to approve/disapprove allocation of budget/resources. It also provides the right depth and breadth of information for technical leaders to provide guidance and recommendations on system architecture and feasibi...

In addressing the challenge of scaling agile within an organization, the focus shifts from ensuring team autonomy and creativity to fostering organizational learning and individual professional development. This transition is crucial, especially as a company grows. In small organizations with just a few teams, agile and Scrum favor team-level optimization. This approach is appropriate in these environments, where the emphasis is on team autonomy, allowing for nimble and creative decision-making. However, as an organization expands and more teams are integrated into the agile framework, this approach can lead to unintended consequences. One significant risk of maintaining the same team-centric approach in a larger organization is the development of silos. Teams, while remaining agile within their own realms, may become isolated, leading to a lack of cross-team collaboration and knowledge sharing. This isolation can foster the emergence of varied subcultures, some of which may not align ...

First, let’s define Agile Product Portfolio Management. Agile Product Portfolio Management is a dynamic approach to managing a company's suite of products. It involves continuously evaluating and prioritizing products based on shifting market demands, customer feedback, and business goals. It integrates principles of Agile methodology - such as flexibility, rapid iteration, and cross-functional collaboration - into portfolio management. The focus is on adapting quickly to changes, making swift decisions based on current data, and ensuring that resources are allocated efficiently to maximize product success and overall business value. It's about maintaining a balance between long-term strategic vision and short-term market realities, ensuring the product portfolio remains relevant and competitive.  Agile Portfolio Management is needed when your business and product line achieve a size, complexity, and maturity where decisions can no longer be locally optimized for individual pro...

The best team size is one that’s small enough to stay nimble, yet big enough to have someone to blame when things go wrong! Scrum recommends a team size of seven people plus or minus two. While seven to nine people seems reasonable, in my experience, it’s hard to imagine a Scrum team size of five taking on complex commercial software - that would be something like the Scrum Master, Product Owner, Two Developers and a Tester. If we look to the popular scaling frameworks for guidance on team size, Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) defers to Scrum for team size guidance as according to its principles, “Large-Scale Scrum is Scrum” while the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) recommends 10 or fewer people. Interestingly, in a somewhat dated survey from Scott Ambler, he found that “roughly half (48%) of agile teams are more than 10 people in size and one-quarter are more than 20 people in size.” It’s unlikely things have changed materially since 2016. This is likely due to the state of agile adoption, awa...

Will increasing the amount of people on a team accelerate value delivery? In the short term, increasing resources on a team that has normalized (see the Tuckman ladder model - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuckman%27s_stages_of_group_development) will likely decrease its velocity as it takes time for the new person to understand the nature of the work and the culture of team. People learn to work together, to improve together, they build trust, they win together and they lose together. Whenever you change the configuration of a team (by adding or removing people) they will probably take a few steps back into Tuckman’s journey or be caught by Brook's Law. The positive impact to the team may take weeks or even months to be realized. Or worst case, the new addition is a bad fit for the team and either self-selects out or is rejected and you’ve likely caused damage to the team that could take weeks or months to recover from, and perhaps impact the career of the person you moved to the ...

An anti-pattern is a common response to a recurring problem that is usually ineffective and risks being highly counterproductive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-pattern). Agile anti-patterns: Longer iterations are introduced Re-planning during iterations regularly occurs The sprint backlog is unrefined and stories are not actionable Unclear or missing user story acceptance criteria Unclear or missing definition of done Work is assigned to developers rather than developers volunteering for work The product owner does not effectively communicate vision and “why it matters” contributing to team demotivation Workarounds are accepted instead of fearless problem solving The team frequently under-delivers on committed stories in the sprint Regular re-allocation of team members (traditional project management resource allocation where the people are brought to the work rather than the work brought to the team) Frequent prolonged broken builds Defect rates are climbing Daily stand-up meetin...

Meta has 3.7B users across its portfolio of apps. About 50MM are influencers/creators. At a $11.99 to $14.99 monthly subscription, providing their customers perceive and realize value, this could be a multi-billion dollar revenue stream to bolster their advertising revenue. Will be interesting to see how this plays out in their test markets. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-19/meta-m-launches-subscription-service-for-facebook-and-instagram