Agile in product management | Product management #21

Introduction

Digital product management is more than just creating new features or solving technical problems. It’s first and foremost about understanding customer needs and delivering value to them. Agile plays a vital role in this process as it promotes flexibility, speed, and continuous collaboration with the customer.

What is Agile?

It is an approach to project management that became popular in the software industry. It is now more than twenty years old. The Agile Manifesto was written in 2001 as a set of principles and values to guide dev teams. Product management focuses on:

• constant adaptation,
• delivering value,
• responding to change,
• close collaboration with the customer.

Nowadays, Agile is applied in diverse, often distant industries. It’s used in education, software development, non-governmental organizations, and even digital product management.

Agile principles in digital product management

There are twelve principles defined in the Agile Manifesto. Today, however, we will focus on the three that we consider most important when it comes to product management, namely:

• Customer satisfaction through early and continuous delivery of valuable software – for example, if you are developing an e-commerce platform, you can focus on providing features that appeal to customers the most, such as a quick purchase process or an intuitive user interface.
• Welcome changing requirements, even late in development – for instance, if you find out that users are not coping with or using a particular product feature, it allows you to make changes quickly, even if you are already deep in the development process.
• Regular reflections on how to become more effective – for example, if your digital product is a language learning app, and suddenly there is a boom in learning Chinese, it will allow you to quickly adjust your app and make changes to meet market needs.

Other principles address such aspects as striving for technical excellence and good design, fostering collaboration between development and business teams, and establishing ground rules within product teams.

Key Agile practices in digital product management

Agile offers several practices that help teams develop and manage digital products effectively. They include:

• Sprint planning – in the sprint planning process, a team decides what will be done in the upcoming sprint. For example, a team may focus on improving the search feature in its e-commerce application.
• Daily stand-ups – are short meetings during which team members share their progress and any problems. For example, developers may share the difficulties they have encountered when integrating with a new payment system and ask other developers for help.
• Sprint reviews – are meetings in which a team presents the work done in a sprint. For example, they can showcase a new feature they have created and ask for feedback.
• Sprint retrospectives – are meetings during which a team analyzes what went well and what can be improved. For example, a team may decide to manage their time better to carry out sprints effectively.

How to define a product vision in Agile?

A product vision is a key element of Agile product management. It shapes a product roadmap and helps the team focus on delivering the greatest value to the customer. For example, if your product vision is creating:

• the easiest-to-use language learning app,
• the safest cryptocurrency exchange,
• the most intuitive app for managing personal finances.

Then all your efforts, from sprint planning to sprint reviews, will be focused on achieving this vision and should relate to it.

How to create an Agile product roadmap?

Product roadmap is a dynamic document that evolves with the product. It is iterative and flexible, allowing teams to quickly adapt to changes. For example, if your digital product is a content management system, a product roadmap may include sprints concentrated on various aspects of the product, such as:

• user interface,
• CMS features,
• integrations with other tools.

Pros and cons of Agile product management

Agile product management does have both pros and cons. Undoubtedly, some of its advantages include:

• Greater flexibility – allows teams to quickly adapt to changing customer and market demands.
• Improved communication – promotes continuous collaboration and communication, which helps teams better understand customer needs and respond faster to changing conditions. For example, thanks to daily standups, a team can quickly identify and solve problems.
• Incremental delivery – with an iterative approach, instead of waiting for a new feature to be fully implemented, customers may use and provide feedback on the evolving product version.

However, Agility is also associated with a few problems, such as:

• Increased complexity – managing a digital product can be more complicated, given the constant iterations and the need to adapt to change.
• Hard work and collaboration – requires team members to be more disciplined and self-reliant, which can make some people feel insecure. Even younger team members need to be able to make decisions and manage their time properly.

Summary

Product management is an approach that can bring several benefits, but it also requires appropriate skills and commitment. If you’re not sure if Agile is the right fit for your product team, you can implement just some of its elements. For instance, break down the work into regular cycles and then consider introducing other aspects of Agile. That’s what makes it so great – you don’t have to introduce it all at once.

If you like our content, join our busy bees community on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, TikTok.