Where’s the Strategy in Your Agile?
If all your company is doing with agile is making better product teams, then you’re missing a lot. Your company is missing a lot. Those few teams will undoubtedly work better and be happier. But how does your company know it’s serving its customers in the best way it can? How does the company adapt more nimbly to the changing market conditions? Without a strategy mixed in with agile driving your transformation, all you have is a mechanical, immature or lesser form of agile.
There are many ways to be strategic in your implementation of agile. Most people are familiar with establishing vision statements (or north stars) and there’s a lot of talk and books lately bringing attention to the concept of OKRs and KPIs (which are not new). Many agilists are even aware of the strategic utility of keeping a Product Roadmap current to reflect where they’re going. Some might even say they use a strategy in a how they prioritize and sequence the backlog. Some even use PI Planning (or Big Room Planning) techniques to inject some strategic thinking into how the next 3 months will unfold. These are all useful and important to different degrees. But what comes first? How are they connected? And what happens if you don’t connect the dots?
There are many agile teams and companies in the midst of agile transformations who are still just going through the motions. Teams are stuck in mechanical Scrum. And maybe your company even hired a big consulting firm that convinced you to implement components of the Spotify Model including Families, Squads and Tribes and the scaling ceremonies that help feel strategic (but mostly just help keep the managers busy). You might be surprised to hear that just because you have agile teams organized into tribes and conduct a PI Planning every three months that you are no more strategic or capable of delivering than you were before. Why is that?
Enterprise-level Impediments
There are two very different enterprise-level impediments that slow down transformations in this way. The first is just natural. It takes time. There will be many parts of an organization that are not yet transitioned to a new way of thinking and a new way of working. When an agile team depends on a non-agile team to deliver something, there will be some friction, delays, and obstacles to overcome. Everyone is going to be in different stages of their learning journey in the middle of a transformation, which has the same effect. Some teams will be maturing, becoming more self-sufficient while others are still learning the mechanics and don’t quite embrace the mindset yet. This particular organizational challenge will work itself out if a company continues to educate, remains dedicated to resolving organizational challenges, AND focuses on implementing a top-down led strategy that embraces agile. The second big impediment, however, happens when a company ignores that last part. Without a top-down strategy, one that defines who the company wants to be; one that challenges the status quo and strives to focus on only the most important products and services they need to serve their customers and employees, well, that company may be stuck in a forever-transformation. Much like the mechanical scrum of a singular team that is going through the motions and using new vocabulary, moving work across a board but not understanding why they do what they do. That enterprise impediment leads to failed transformations, or worse, ones that do nothing impactful but spend money, frustrate key employees, and deliver work much in the same way as it ever had.
So, how does a company fix that? First of all, the executive leadership team needs to be bought into the concepts agile. In particular, they need to be bought into the ideas of limiting work-in-progress, customer-centricity, iterative thinking, and most importantly having a vision and implementing a strategy to connect that vision to all of the teams and employees. It’s also necessary to say, the executives need to not just understand these concepts, they need to embrace them and live them.
Limit Work in Progress
Limiting work-in-progress means they need to stop pretending they can do everything and focus on a shorter list of active work which improves overall quality. This will likely mean making serious changes to the organizational structure to focus on creating meaningful teams that have what they need to be successful. They can demonstrate they understand this concept by implementing an Executive Portfolio Wall to show the flow of ideas and unfunded initiatives vs. those that are active or nearing completion. The transparency of which teams are focused on which initiatives and seeing that visually is important because it becomes obvious where a company is stretched too thin and helps question where there may be overspending.
Customer Centricity
Customer-centricity is an easy thing to say and a hard thing to do. What if the executives asked every team how long it’s been since they talked to a customer? What if that metric was on a dashboard and showed trend lines by team over time? What if it became part of regular conversation between executives and teams? Would that drive positive changes in behavior that helped a company get better connected to customers? It would be a start anyway. But what do those interactions look like? What information is being gathered? What do we do with that information? Do we even have a Customer Experience division helping to define the journeys of our customers? Every product or service, every team and Product Owner should have a plan for how to incorporate the customer into their processes.
Iterative Thinking and Strategy
Implementing strategic concepts into a company’s agile transformation and thinking iteratively are very related. For a team, thinking iteratively is about delivering results in small amounts to create better feedback loops so they can decide better what to do next in order to achieve the desired outcomes. For a company, thinking iteratively is about deliberately creating a high level vision and plan with metrics and measures that inspect and adapt on progress at a macro level. A company needs to know who it is first. Then they need to know what they should be focused on. Presumably, they have verified these assumptions about their business with the market. Recently. Too many companies are still operating on a strategy that was built 10, 20, or 150 years ago. If we’ve learned anything about the world recently, it’s that it can change very rapidly. It’s a VUCA world!
Larger companies may need to have multiple high-level vision statements for each business unit, especially if they operate against different customer segments. Each product solution or family of products should have strategic objectives set for a one year horizon. Where necessary, different objectives can set longer term strategic direction over three or five year horizons. But for agile to most efficacious, use the one year objectives to determine which key results will best measure progress against that objective. These OKRs, combined with the vision statement should be enough to inspire Product Roadmaps that help achieve those objectives. The focus should be on the “why”, how it serves the customer, and the specific desired outcomes that help achieve those results. There are no solutions yet in this strategy; only vision, objectives, metrics, and desired outcomes. With a strategically aligned and outcome-oriented Product Roadmap, the team(s) working in this area should have enough information to inspire the right Epics and Stories to define, prioritize, and deliver the solutions and work that achieves the desired outcomes.
When a strategy as stated above is executed properly, every single employee in the company knows exactly how their work directly impacts the customers and end users, why they exist, what outcomes they are working to achieve, and they understand the clear meaning and purpose to the work they do. This connecting of the dots and alignment of strategy has some tremendous side benefits. From the very top, no one is spinning up new projects that don’t align with the strategic purpose of the company; no one is squeezing in side-projects that waste time and money; no one is unclear about priorities, or short term goals, or long term goals. And, if it’s done well, it also makes for much happier employees.
I know myself, that when I can see the direct line to the strategic impact of my work, I no longer feel like a cog in the machine, lost among thousands of employees, and instead feel pride and connection to the greater mission.
Learn more
Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs (2018)
OKRs for All: Making Objectives and Key Results Work for your Entire Organization (2022)
WHAT IS AN OKR? HERE ARE THE BASICS. (Jeff Gothelf)
Escape from the feature roadmap to outcome-driven development (mind the PRODUCT)
Taking Agile Forward (Executive Portfolio Wall and Flow) by Fin Goulding
Hi, I’m Brian Link, an Enterprise Agile Coach who loves his job helping people. I call myself and my company the “Practical Agilist” because I pride myself on helping others distill down the practices and frameworks of the agile universe into easy to understand and simple common sense. I offer fractional agile coaching services to help teams improve affordably. See more at FractionalAgileCoach.com
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