The Good, the Bad and the Agile
You need a sharp product vision to make sure you keep working towards your goal. Agile frameworks tend to blur your vision, here’s why.
After 15 years of being involved in all sorts of digital product development projects I can say one thing is certain:
Unless you’ve got a snappy product vision which everyone on your team is familiar with no development process will save your product from failure. No matter how many milestones you reach on time, how many features you ship, no matter the velocity of your team or how many tests pass the QA. Unless you stop and re-evaluate your goal in between those sprints, unless you’ve defined what success looks like for you to begin with– you’re most likely going to ship some shit no one needs. Shit on time, shit in increments. Defined, refined and well-designed shit. Shit with release notes, shit in darkmode. Straight-up worthless, waste-of-time shit.
Don’t look up
Not only does agile development not save you from building lots of, err, 💩. Standardized processes such as scrum can actually increase the risk for project teams to producing anything but a valuable product.
Why? The answer may be simple: it just feels right.
All those rituals, the whole routine of estimation sessions, sprint plannings, daily stand-ups, sprint reviews and all that– it formally does follow some plan and thus feels highly professional and productive. I’ve seen it countless times. Once the machinery is running nobody wants to think about stopping it. We tend to avoid conflict and naturally feel more comfortable sticking to an ongoing plan than doubting it. After all, chances are you’re seen as a party pooper, a lousy team player, or even worse: you just don’t get it. Asking “what the hell are we even working on here?!” is especially hard in environments that heavily rely on processes.
As Pavel Samsonov put it:
Conformity 🔔 🧍🏻🧍🏽♀️🧍🏿♂️️🧍🏻♀️🧍🏼🧍🏾🧍🏽♂️
‘A bet on failing invisibly’ is what your process should never become, of course. But guess what, the behavior of conformity is rooted in our nature. This social experiment hilariously demonstrates the phenomenon.
We seem to prefer tagging along our peers by nature, especially in imposing environments. Studies suggest that group size impacts behavioral conformity, too. Don’t we all do useless stand-ups? 😂
Turns out it’s not a matter of agile VS. waterfall but instead a matter of play along VS. call out bullshit.
What you can do:
Check yourself before you wreck yourself
Establish a habit of challenging and re-evaluating your direction on a regular basis. Build sanity checks into your process– especially under time pressure. You can use retrospectives but decision makers usually aren’t in those. Also, you could argue as a ritual they’re part of the problem, not the solution.
So unless you have a clear focus of what you should be sprinting towards there’s no way of verifying you’re on the right track. Not sure where to start?
[In the style of ‘The Simpsons’ theme voice:]
The vision 🎵
Here’s an easy format to write a spot-on product vision. Originally intended for selling your idea to investors, the classic elevator pitch also helps you and your team stay on track. It answers all the important questions:
- Who’s it for️
- What’s their problem
- What’s it called
- What’s the product category
- What does it do
- Who’s the competition
- How’s it different from theirs
Here’s the format:
🤷♀️ FOR_________[target group]💆♀️ WHO_________[their problem/need]❓ THE_________[name of your product]🔖 IS A________[type of product]🔨 THAT________[main feature in a nutshell].🏪 UNLIKE______[competitors]🥊 OUR PRODUCT_[unique selling proposition]
Let’s see it in action with an example:
FOR digital product designersWHO want to create UI designs easily and hand them off to devsTHE Figma design toolIS A cloud-based browser applicationTHAT allows real-time collaboration and a free plan.UNLIKE Sketch, InVision and ZeplinOUR PRODUCT covers all features, is easier to learn and has a ton of plugins.
The Who, the What and the Why
There’s plenty of similar formats that all have the same intention of boiling things down to the essence and painting a picture of what you aim to achieve.
Some are more detailed than others.
I prefer a short and crisp sentence that gets the purpose across and can be posted on your wall. Everyone on your team should have the goal in mind and make sure their work is always consistent with the vision. Every decision, even the smallest choice, should be aligned with the overall purpose.
I usually have different members of the client’s team each fill out the elevator pitch template by themselves in a workshop at the beginning of a project. It’s quite revealing how different their ideas of the same project goal can be :)
Some things to keep in mind when writing the product vision:
- ✅ Be aspirational yet realistic
- ✅ Keep it customer-centered
- 🚫 Don’t be too general (“a product for everyone that can be used for everything”)
- 🚫 Don’t cheat the format writing lots and lots of text
- ✅ Collaborate with your team on it
- ✅ Iterate
Now, what are you working on? How do you manage to laser focus on implementing your vision?
Bonus question: would you use/buy what you’re working on yourself?
:)
I’d be very happy about your claps, comments or other feedback.
By the way. I am a product person at Future Forms ❤️, a digital product design and development studio.
Have a look at www.futureforms.studio and say hello!
If you liked this article, here’s the first part of it:
