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!