Product Value

• PROCESS FAILURE:
  • business projects are prone to failure – particularly large and complex projects
  • The more you hope to achieve, the more likely you are to be unsuccessful
  • Well, the technology industry addresses the issue by looking at the processes we use to complete projects
• Waterfall
  • dominant product development practice for the past half-century
  • is a methodology for developing products that organizes work into large sequential steps
  • Big steps are more likely to fail. For one reason, it requires you to predict outcomes sometimes months or years ahead of time
  • Project oriented: The Iron Triangle: Delivering on Scope, on Time, on Budget
  • about delivering on time and managing resources versus delivery of a quality product that delights customers. It is about “just getting it done” on time
  • Project oriented: The Iron Triangle: Delivering on Scope, on Time, on Budget
  • Sequential approach taking big steps
    • 1. Requirements Analysis
    • 2. Design
    • 3. Implementation
    • 4. Testing
    • release
    • 5. Maintenance
• Scrum is… (is about delivering higher value more frequently)
  • SCRUM FRAMEWORK TO CURB FAILURE AND DELIVER VALUE
  • Scrum directly addresses many of the shortcomings of Waterfall with project management
    • Empirical instead of predictive
    • Iterative instead of sequential
    • Concentrated on gathering continuous feedback instead of gathering in stages
    • Customer Value-focused instead of deadline-focused
    • Self-organizing instead of control and command
• 4 Steps to Optimize Product Value
  • 4 dimensions of Scrum Mastery
    • Team Identity
    • Team Process
    • Product Value
    • the Organization
  • Are you building the right thing to create value for the organization? How do you know?
  • If you are not asking these two questions regularly, you might be missing the product value dimension
  • The product is the purpose of what you are, so, you must focus on understanding and growing product value
  • 1: Foster a Product Mindset (over a project mindset)
    • A product mindset is about focusing on creating valuable outcomes
    • Output doesn’t matter if you are building things people don’t want or won’t use.
    • project mindset:
      • The measure of success is usually based on the iron triangle
        • delivering all defined scope on time and on budget
    • *Scrum is not about delivering more things faster and cheaper...*
    • Scrum is about delivering higher value more frequently…
    • And by doing this, you reduce risk to the organization and tap into the art of the possible
    • It is very easy to slip back into old ways of thinking, especially under pressure
    • A PO plays an important role in fostering this product mindset within the ST and the organization
  • 2: Paint the Bigger Picture
    • Since you are building iteratively and incrementally, it is essential to have a clear idea about the bigger picture of what you are working towards and why
    • This helps determine if you are still in alignment and informs adaptations needed
    • There are many techniques to help clarify what the product is trying to achieve (product vision), and the business model behind it
    • product vision
      • communicates what you desire this product to be and for whom
      • It speaks to the target customer and the primary value proposition provided to that customer
    • defining value –
      • There will be many features and functions desired
      • In order to make decisions about what is more valuable or less valuable
      • you must define the most important facets of value for the product and how you will know that you achieved the desired value
      • examples of types of value:
        • Business goals (e.g. customer conversion rate)
        • Profit/ revenue (e.g. revenue per customer, repeat customers)
        • Cost savings (e.g. customer acquisition cost, cost/ customer)
        • Customer/ user growth (e.g. new customers, market share, customers using latest release)
        • Feature usage (e.g. customers using a feature, time spent using feature)
      • Now get specific with defining value statements and how you will measure value
  • 3: Enable Value Emergence
    • Solutions to complex problems will emerge as you do the work (not just by analyzing and talking about the work)
      • You could learn that assumptions were wrong
      • You could see that the market or even the business model has changed
    • So you must enable value to emerge as you build the product
    • The Product Backlog represents what you plan to build and the order in which you plan to build it
    • POs must leverage techniques and skills that engage and enable others to collaborate in the process of Product Backlog refinement
      • POs are not expected to determine what is valuable in isolation
      • POs are not expected to know the best way to break down value into smaller, clearer pieces and perfectly capture it in writing
    • 3 things to focus on to enable value emergence through your PB refinement process
      • Break things down smaller
        • Once the vision is established, identifying key business outcomes or goals on the path towards the vision
        • Then you can identify the key features, functions, or capabilities expected to deliver those desired outcomes
        • The smaller you break things down, the more flexibility you have and the faster you can deliver value and validate assumptions
        • Remember, don’t need to break everything down up front. the PB emerges over time
        • Models
          • Story Mapping
          • Assumptions Mapping
      • Create an understanding of value alignment
        • Focus on value instead of features: identify the desired outcomes
        • Many times PBIs state the features and functions desired, switch this to focus more on the desired outcomes for the feature or function
        • Models
          • User Stories
          • Hypothesis Driven Development
          • A/B Tests
          • capture value as metadata for each PBI (example: a ROI amount)
      • Zoom out/ zoom in
  • 4: Validate Actual Value
  • Conclusion
• Empathy Driven Development