Mr Data is our new boss

In my May post, I wrote about product management by dictate and the feature factory that this non-agile way of working results in. My conclusion was that in order to shut down the feature factory, we need to build a value-driven organization. Instead of believing that customer value is created by product management pushing features to the customers through the development organization, the role of product management shall be to define which effect all the hard work shall actually result in.

A number of things must have been put into place before transforming from the old feature factory into the brave new world of value-driven development:

• The organization must have articulated a clear and complete vision. Otherwise it will not be possible to break down the vision into clear missions and measurable goals, which is a prerequisite for the transformation. 
• It must be possible to deliver customer value continuously, at least once a sprint. And it must be easy to measure the impact of a delivery. Otherwise, the feedback loop from the customers will be severed.
• The organization must have a culture where it is safe to fail. The journey to becoming truly value-driven will mean a lot of experiments. Some of these experiments will fail, but failure is actually learning in disguise, as I wrote in a previous blog post. 

Classically, the four basic management skills are defined as to plan, organize, direct and control. I believe this is still valid, but with a twist: In management's new role, "directing" boils down to setting an organizational vision, together with team missions and effect goals. The "planning" and "organizing" parts of classic management are carried out by the teams. The "controlling" part is implemented through the build-measure-learn loop. This loop also continuously tweaks the "directing".

Therefore, in a value-driven organization, the team's bosses will be the mission and the data.

Since management will no longer need to plan, organize, direct or control the value-creation work, they will be able to grow into servant leaders - people with great skills in listening, empathy, healing, awareness, persuasion, conceptualization, foresight, stewardship, commitment to the growth of others, and building community - based on the works of Robert K Greenleaf. This type of management will take the organization to a whole new level of success.

After the fall of the feature factory, gone will be the days when a product manager could push a big project through the organization and celebrate it as a huge success, even though it actually did not result in a huge increase in real customer value. Gone will also be the days of the old-style manager.

In a value-driven organization, we make sure that both people and product reach their fullest potential. Now that is something worth celebrating!

Solving the Feature factory dilemma

I had an epiphany on The feature factory and its root causes a few days ago, so I really need to write this blog post. I have been extremely busy through all of April and May with a huge project that has eaten most of my productive time-off hours, but this epiphany of mine fitted perfectly in the urgent swimlane of my internal Kanban board.

In short, the feature factory dilemma hits an organization when the development process has shifted to agile, but the product organization is still stuck in a command-and-control way of working. Such an organization's optimization goal is throughput. Throughput of "stuff" decided on and prioritized by product management. This stuff is, given that we have an agile development process, pulled from the product backlog, developed in the teams, and the pushed out to the customers. For better or worse.

Product management cannot see that there is a problem with this setup - everyone is busy processing their backlog! So what is actually the problem?

And this is where this week's epiphany comes in:

Customer value is not something that you push unto your customers. Customer value is something that the customers pull from you!

The customers use the organization's feedback loops to pull value from the organization. But in a feature factory, these feedbacks loops are of secondary importance, if at all implemented.

If the product backlog is dictated solely by product management, we will probably end up creating vast amounts of waste since we don't take into consideration what the customers really want.

What we want to do is to replace this throughput-driven feature factory with value-driven product development!

The solution to the feature factory dilemma is to make the product organization agile! Implement feedback loops so you can see more clearly what the customers really think of your product. Instead of having the PO dictate what the development team shall work on, identify applicable value streams/domains and form Product teams within these that take full E2E responsibility for delivering real value to the customers.

Another great thing with product teams is that we once and for all tear down the walls between the development and product organizations. We need the product and development compentences to be on the same team, not in separate silos!