5 Values for the Future of Tech Product Development

We are Consequential — we critically challenge the norm; disruption, but for the common good. And it’s with this perspective that we explore the role of responsibility and ethics in agile and our proposed new values for going beyond working code in agile product development.

The Next 20 Years of Agile Product Development

When we were invited to speak at a large technology conference on agile by METRO, we started thinking… it’s been almost 20 years since the Agile Manifesto was published. It’s a brilliant document which has changed so many aspects of how we work and create tech products for the better.

But like anything in our fast-paced and constantly changing world, questions consistently bubble up within the (agile) community about its continued relevance and usefulness.

Tech has eaten the world, and for this to be a positive thing we want to reframe and refocus what we value in its creation and how that can impact what gets put into the world.

It’s time for new values to dictate the creation of tech products. We share our ideas for what these new values could be in the spirit of our goal, disruption for the common good.

The original agile manifesto and its values pointed out many of the problems with software development that were present at the time. In creating our ideas for new values, we looked to do the same. Mainly, we recognise that often we can be so focused on developing the best product in the world, we forget about asking if it’s the best product for the world.

With that in mind, our ideas for 5 new agile values for the future of tech product development are:

• Stakeholder conscious over customer-centric
• Focusing on objectives over measuring output
• Foresight over failing fast
• Collective responsibility over disjointed disempowerment
• Critical questioning over rigid rituals

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

How these values interact with how agile exsits in or organisations

From our view, the way agile has been deployed in the last 20 years in a variety of contexts and companies comes down to 2 things:

• Agile as an incremental way to develop products, with rituals and iterative practices and procedures that have common attributes and result in working code.
• And agile as a way of working, with shared language and values about teamwork and collaboration within an organisational environment.

Each of these ways agile exists in organisations will need some of the new values we introduce below.

The Future of Incremental Product Development

COVID has thrown a bit of a wrench into how the world works. One thing that’s changed in the last few years is that the world is increasingly ideological and political. In the past, brands and products spoke to consumers and customers, and politics spoke for society. Now, these things are starting to merge — brands don’t have the luxury of removing themselves from the politics of society, with prominent marketers starting to believe that trying to pretend to be neutral can do more harm than good.

And in the same way, product teams can no longer afford to stay insulated and introspective. The new values for the future of product development will need to address what happens in the world more than ever before.

For the future of agile product development, we believe there needs to be a shift from being customer-centric to becoming stakeholder-conscious, from outputs to objectives, and from failing fast to foresight.

From Customer-Centric to Stakeholder-Conscious

The first principle of agile states: Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

We’re all passionate about the customer. We’re used to thinking about the customer in every interaction. But the need to be engaged with the messiness of politics and address the interconnectedness of the world raises a big question at the heart of product decisions; is the highest priority really only your customer?

More than ever, the customer landscape is complex. The world is networked and globalised. What you create will impact many, not only your customers.

This is why we believe that teams need to shift from being solely customer-centric to stakeholder-conscious. Stakeholders are all of the people and systems who have a vested interest in, or will be impacted by, your product. This goes beyond traditional business stakeholders to include groups like the other people in your users’ lives, future generations, and the planet.

We can’t continue to focus only on the customer and let the consequences that fall on other stakeholders be out of scope. All stakeholder needs and interests should be taken into consideration and weighed and balanced alongside your customers.

From our view, one of the biggest things teams may need to learn now is how to openly weigh which stakeholders they are going to benefit more with the product decisions they make.

How can teams make more open and deliberate decisions about trade-offs ? How can expanding our view of who gets considered help with innovation? How can this support the longer-term value of the product?

From Measuring Outputs to Focusing on Objectives

There is a discussion taking place within the agile community now about measuring outputs versus outcomes.

From our perspective, when thinking about positive social impact within product development, it’s not only about how much you’ve shipped or how many tickets or stories you’ve completed, but about what your original intent was — what objectives did you set that would determine if your outputs were a success? What were you trying to achieve?

Often, objectives get broken down into smaller, measurable indicators of how much stuff you’re producing, and those outputs come to dictate teams’ decisions instead of the real goal. This can put emphasis and incentives in place for the wrong things; as the saying goes — what gets measured gets managed.

For example, a start-up may have an objective to prove product fit in a certain market, and their chosen indicator is to reach 1000 customers. Their team then focuses solely on getting 1000 customers through any means necessary — like predatory data practices — obscuring if they’re getting traction because of the quality of their product. Or an internal IT service may want to prove it’s a useful resource, and the indicator they choose is the number of tickets they close. This incentivises teams to do the minimum needed to help and to close the ticket as quickly as possible — measuring only quantity rather than quality of service and undermining their usefulness, which was actually their goal in the first place.

Putting emphasis on output and away from intent is problematic for making responsible decisions that take businesses in meaningful directions. It can harm the original purpose of a business or a product, and incentivizes behaviour that’s damaging to stakeholders.

Objectives should be the compass and the main focus of teams, not the outputs that are only meant to be indicators towards the goal.

Emphasizing objectives rather than outputs should help teams not only focus on the big picture, but have more ownership and room to be creative.

As well, the process of setting objectives and ensuring everyone in an organisation understands how their outputs help achieve those objectives can help to align people towards the same goal and have more ownership.

From Failing Fast to Foresight

Is the old tech mantra of moving fast and breaking things still relevant?

Business leaders like Mark Zuckerberg and others have openly admitted they never stopped to think about the consequences of their technology when they were first creating it. And this attitude filtered through the industry.

Consequences happen, regardless if we pay attention to them or not. Consequences can range from minor issues like bugs that show people’s data in a pay form, or bad user experience design or dark patterns. Or consequences can be major, like a company’s decision to go to market with a facial recognition software at the point where it’s only been trained on data sets of white people.

This mantra is about getting what we create out to people as quickly as possible, seeing what works, and then iterating it. There’s value in doing this, but only when balanced with an awareness of where you can fail and where you cannot. Knowing this is all about context — in heart surgery, failing is not an option, but in creating a gaming app some iteration can be ideal.

The problem is that in many organisations, value hasn’t been placed on the reflection needed to determine this context. In our experience and our research, the reason there are so many unintended consequences is often because reflection and foresight on the consequences of a product on all stakeholders wasn’t built into the agile process.

As a result, companies have suffered massive reputational damage, missed opportunities to harness human diversity to solve new problems, and created products that were not as good as they could have been.

So we ask: Does that mantra still work for us? What are we breaking, and will it be damaged beyond repair? What’s the collateral damage across all stakeholders, including future generations? How can we build foresight into our processes to ask hard questions?

Summary

For the future of agile product development, we believe there needs to be a shift from being customer-centric to becoming stakeholder-conscious. A shift from outputs to objectives. And a shift from failing fast to foresight.

Future Values for Working Together

Organisations don’t always adopt every agile process or practice — like flat hierarchies or working in cross-discipline pods, for example — so much as they adopt some of the rituals and ideals behind agile, like daily stand-ups or going fast.

It’s in this place where agile values come to dictate ways of working for product teams that we want to focus our other ideas.

Agile is anchored deeply around the idea of motivated individuals — “give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done”.

What motivates most people is changing — it used to be that autonomy was a leading motivator for people. Now, social impact and purpose are leading motivators.

There are many recent employee surveys that all say the same thing, but for example the Deloitte Global Millennial Survey 2020 explores the views of more than 27.5 thousand millennials and Gen Zs to understand their perspectives on business, government, climate, and the pandemic, among other issues. The survey reveals that millennials and Gen Zs have remained focused on larger societal issues, both before and after the onset of the pandemic. If anything, the pandemic has reinforced their desire to help drive positive change in their communities and around the world. And they continue to push for a world in which businesses and governments mirror that same commitment to society, putting people ahead of profits and prioritizing environmental sustainability. Companies should be trying to find ways to put these considerations at the heart of their operations if they want to retain motivated and talented people.

Along with changing motivations, companies should focus on who gets to be in the ‘room where it’s happening’. The fourth principle of agile is that business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project, and many organisations have worked to close this gap. We firmly support cross-functional questioning and building of products — for both efficiency and for broader perspectives.

But as the world changes there’s a missing group — the people who are able to represent your stakeholders and bring knowledge of society and the products’ potential impact within it.

Increasingly, future fit companies are recognising the importance of this competency and are hiring people into roles or providing training. But this is meaningless if they’re not represented in the decision-making processes around the product.

As McKinsey and every other consultancy on the planet is pointing out, “the world of work is changing… While some jobs will be lost, and many others created, almost all will change.” The future of work is an intense debate at the moment, but what everyone is sure of is that what comes next may be radically different from what we’ve been used to up to this point.

We sincerely hope a big part of that difference will be about hiring responsibility technologists and how businesses can operate differently to produce innovations that support the public interest.

To see that happen, there are a few shifts that need to happen within organisations. We propose the new values of collective responsibility over disjointed disempowerment, and critical questioning over rigid rituals — whether agile or otherwise.

From Disjointed Disempowerment to Collective Responsibility

In product, engineering, and design, there’s a deep sense of responsibility for delivering value and for direct impact on a customer.

But what does collective responsibility look like? Especially in large organisations and in teams where you might only be building a small part of a whole?

In their 2019 report, one of AI Now’s recommendations was that ‘tech workers should have the right to know what they are building and to contest unethical or harmful uses of their work.’

This isn’t only for tech — everyone should be empowered to know what they’re building and given the opportunity to either influence its direction, or challenge or protest. Teams deserve the opportunity to determine where they are collectively responsible and where it’s ok to fail (or not).

Responsibility is a scale, and with this in mind we want to introduce two different types of responsibility that you as an individual or a team might be able to take.

You can take direct responsibility — this means you’ve considered impacts on all stakeholders and you can do something about it as an individual or a team. You can take action, make a decision, change a feature, change the product vision.

Or you can take influencing responsibility. This means you can’t make the decision yourself, but you can influence the outcome. This might look like bringing in other experts, working with another team, or escalating your concerns up the chain. It might mean you look outside of your organisation for advice.

People tend to underestimate the power of influencing responsibility. We all know that organisations run on relationships and that more often than not this is the real way change happens.

But it’s only in determining what kind of responsibility you can take and following through on it can teams more actively shape what gets put into the world. People who make code literally create something out of nothing. Feeling as though they have no power in determining how their work is used, especially when there are huge societal consequences at stake, isn’t tenable.

From Rigid Rituals to Critical Questioning

Over time, and with age, flexibility has a tendency to become rigid — whether that’s muscles, mindsets, or processes; it’s a human thing. In some places, rituals of agile that are meant to be lightweight have instead become rigid. For example, timeboxing comes to mean there’s no time instead of meaning meetings should be well-prepared to allow for meaningful discussion.

In working collectively, there’s often an underlying assumption that good intent always leads to good results, but this often simply isn’t the case. In David Marquet’s book Turn the Ship Around! he suggests a ‘Questioning attitude over blind obedience’. We love the idea of critical questioning being a core value of agile — though we’re maybe less keen on blind obedience as a problem.

From our view, the problem with overly rigid organisations is that they can stifle critical questioning and exploration. Critical questioning is already at the heart of agile through the use of the retrospective, but we believe there’s also explicit value in questioning the product within a team environment. Because we believe that good intent paired with critical questioning and embedded foresight leads to good results.

Critical questioning isn’t about slowing down development, but rather about inserting healthy friction with the goal of creating the best possible product.

Friction in design used to be seen as the enemy, but time has shown it can be the best thing for everyone. For example, many banks have designed a few critical questions into their money sending apps in order to combat fraud.

Which is why we want to see the same spirit present within agile and within teams. More importantly, how can critical questioning with a motivation for positive impact become part of the practices and processes of software development?

Summary

We propose the values that underpin our ways of working together are responsibility over disempowerment, and critical questioning over rigid rituals — whether agile or otherwise.

The next 20 years of product development

We hope our ideas can help to positively shape the next 20 years of agile product development, creating disruption to our current norms for the common good.

As our thinking evolves, we welcome input and conversation about these ideas and what you see.

Consequential does both big ‘I’ and little ‘i’ innovation to change the existing business landscape. This means we focus on large-scale systems change within business and tech, and strategy and innovation within individual organisations to build their businesses and products in more responsible ways.