How to make product development more predictable?
Product development is an extremely challenging task in the modern world. Product development, by definition, is an end-to-end process ranging from ideating, designing, developing and finally pushing it to delivery. Product development involves creation of an entirely new product or upgrading an existing product by exploring all possibilities and outcomes to meet customer needs. Product development is not that easy and straight-forward as it seems to be and demands a clear focus, vision, support and guidance. This article talks about how we made our product development more predictable and thereby increased the speed of development by more than 50%.
‘Excellence is not an act. It’s a habit’ — Aristotle. The key to building execution excellence lies in adopting a right process.
What have been the top challenges at KNOLSKAPE?
- Cross-functional team collaboration with no transparency or coordination
- Lack of predictability in execution and no clear goal with a plan
- Team, Time and Technology
- Not having a thorough market research and user studies before building a product
- Building the right product and iterating by incorporating customer feedback
- Not having a skilled and motivated workforce
Organizations and employees associated with product development must be mindful of these various obstacles. With teams being pulled into different directions, how do we make progress on the envisioned roadmap? How do we reach our goals or targets within the stipulated time?
According to an HBR article, below are some of the common myths or fallacies pertaining to product development:
- High utilization of resources will improve performance
- Processing work in large batches improves the economics of the development process
- Our development plan is great; we just need to stick to it
- The sooner the project is started, the sooner it will be finished
- The more features we put into a product, the more customers will like it
- We will be more successful if we get it right the first time
So, how do we handle these challenges and overcome the problems these fallacies create, and strive towards making an efficient and predictable product development process?
What is the solution?
Agile Product development is the way forward to overcome all the above mentioned product development obstacles and make our execution more process-oriented and thereby more predictable. Agile Product Development is a new approach to build products faster and with more innovation — strongly emphasizing rapid iteration, tight communication between a diverse team, and an openness to embracing change.
How does it solve?
Agile product development focuses on valuing individuals and interactions over processes and tools, working product over comprehensive documentation, customer collaboration over contract negotiation, responding to change over following a plan.
An agile approach breaks down product development into short review cycles or sprints, with incremental product improvements being delivered at the end. Agile Development is a collaborative process, using customer feedback to determine the next set of tasks.
So, fast iteration and tight communication are key elements of agile product design and development. It allows us to be adaptable, embrace change and learn as you go.
Agile @KNOLSKAPE
At KNOLSKAPE, we have adopted the agile process for our product development and have seen significant progress and improvement. As an initial part of adopting this agile process, we have designed a standard product development life cycle that needs to be adhered to for any product development execution. You can see a snapshot of the Product Development Life Cycle at the top. The length of this cycle varies depending upon the product/project. It clearly outlines the right time for every team to get their respective job done to ensure effectiveness and efficiency in the process.
Following agile practices alone would not result directly in achieving the established goals. Doing agile is highly different from Being agile. The former focuses more on adopting agile practices, whereas the latter refers to the mindset or organizational culture, which is the prime ingredient to success and the right way forward. Doing agile is easy, but being agile is difficult. Doing Agile can be achieved overnight, whereas Being agile is a journey.
Thanks to our great team (Ramya, Sreedhar and Bharath), who have taken the initiative and have been instrumental in incorporating agile practices into the organization and bringing it to the forefront.
Adopting an Agile Product Development process at KNOLSKAPE enabled us to
- decrease development cycle times and make it more predictable
- improve quality and lower development risk
- fail early and recover early through frequent iterations
- divide fast-moving large projects into easily manageable sprints
- give clear visibility to the team and transparency wrt effort involved
- adopt feedback from customers and stakeholders and work iteratively
- efficiently handle resource constraints or shared resources working on multiple projects
During this entire process of adopting and incorporating agile practices at KNOLSKAPE, we have seen issues and faced some challenges. Some of them are highlighted below:
- mindset change and organizational culture change
- seems like micro-management, too many meetings frustrate team members
- Shared resources and adhoc requests
- leads to scope creep sometimes, due to the lack of a definite end-date
- chances of project failure are high if individuals aren’t very committed or cooperative
- sprint management and team dynamics
The Future
There are still quite a few areas/stages in the product development life cycle that needs to be improved upon and we will focus on moving in that direction going forward, thereby making the product development process more stable.
Our aim in the future would be to have a completely structured product development process across all teams/departments, which would help us in achieving the target of creating a right product for the right people in the right way at the right time.
