a·gen·tic a·gil·i·ty

Product Goal is an Intermediate Strategic Goal

TL;DR; Product Goals serve as intermediate steps that help teams evaluate and adapt progress toward broader strategic objectives, especially in uncertain environments. Focusing on outcomes over outputs, investing in discovery through flexible team allocation, and running hypothesis-driven experiments are key to delivering real value. Development managers should shift away from traditional project management and factory-style practices, adopting a data-driven, experimental approach to stay competitive and responsive.

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The Evidence-Based Management Guide describes not only a Strategic Goal but also an Intermediate Strategic Goal that is needed to evaluate and adapt your progress towards your intended visions of your product.

Product Goal is an Intermediate Strategic Goal

Reaching strategic goals requires experimenting, inspecting, and adapting

The key to realising an agile mindset within the business is the idea of experimentation and that we don’t know where we want to get to, largely because the future of our business is clouded in the fog of war. There is always a high degree of uncertainty of the future and nothing has illustrated that more in recent times than the COVID-19 pandemic. Every business had to reassess its Strategic objectives more than normal, and normal is often a lot.

The fog of war (German: Nebel des Krieges) is the uncertainty in situational awareness experienced by participants in military operations. The term seeks to capture the uncertainty regarding one’s own capability, adversary capability, and adversary intent during an engagement, operation, or campaign. Military forces try to reduce the fog of war through military intelligence and friendly force tracking systems.

Wikipedia

Since presenting Evolution not Transformation: This is the Inevitability of change I have come to realise more and more that it is the Business and Executive leadership that is holding back the retirement of the traditional practices that were developed to manage factory workers in favour of those needed to manage cognitive work. Even a cursory look at many of the modern organisations that are able to adapt to business changes shows a far greater success than other more traditionally run businesses. Think Spotify, Zappos, Microsoft, Apple, Google.

We need to adopt the key practices of Product Discovery that is adapted for the modern world. These are:

We need to reassess the use of the terms Scope & Failure in light of this new reality and evolve into a lean data-driven organisation based on experimentation and discovery that allows us to adapt to business changes as they arise!

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